Shoutout to The Waffle Party, a delightful virtual hangout where art pals from the midwest and east coast get together and make stuff during a long video call, for the inspiration - as this exchange was the final mic drop moment of the evening. This is the first time I’ve leveraged puppetry construction to build an interactive comic, I mean - what’s better than complicating the already arduous process of drawing a comic by installing a mechanism in it? [note: I originally made this into a GIF, but turns out Substack doesn’t allow those to be uploaded :( so I had to post them as separate photos here - harumph. I’ve posted the gif version of this on my art blog to see it in all it’s rightful cranking glory.
Tonight my classmate remarked how she enjoys seeing behind the scenes footage of a maker’s process, so I’m going to try to share more of those here. I’ll start with the prototype I built for this:
Originally I went with an aspect ratio closer to a traditional comic frame, but in the final copy I wanted to purposefully stretch that concept as much as I could so I decided to use more angular lines for the frame. I also knew I had to use watercolor paint to more accurately convey who was talking when, at first I tried using different pens and colored ink, but that created an uneven weight to the words I didn’t want. The blue color wheel in the background inspired me to make this crankie comic, along with the Magritte coffee cup on my desk that I keep some of my pens in.
Be well,
Allyson