Howefitz Blog

In my quest to develop a webcomic based on my family, I have found myself exploring what it is about the webcomics that I read that keep me coming back. A lot of that has to do with what’s below the comic: many creators blog underneath their comic updates. These blogs, like any blog, contain everything from helpful insight to what the artist ate for dinner.

One creator that includes helpful content is Travis Hanson over at his webcomic The Bean. Recently, he posted a blog entry titled Your Adventure: Creating Your Story. The entire post is well worth the read, but this passage caught my eye:

William Stout, his art is so cool and a reason why I do what I do, told me that everything around you is diverse and your art should mirror that. Trees do not all look the same, homes are different, bottles are different, people are different. Learn to diversify your artwork and learn to draw backgrounds.

Backgrounds and props have always been difficult for me because I had the misperception that they were boring and not part of the storytelling. This is completely false. The actors that are created need a place to live, and the reader needs to believe in that place.

It’s funny, Netflix just added a bunch of old school Nickelodeon cartoons to stream online, and I have been introducing my three year old to Rugrats and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. I used to like those shows for the writing, but something bugged me about the art work. Watching them now I’ve realized that what bothers me is that the backgrounds look exactly like the characters. Generally, cartoon characters are put in front of backgrounds that look more realistic, or at least different than the characters. Not so in those old Nickelodeon toons, creating what appear to be very flat worlds…

Not much pushes the characters out from the background in 'Rugrats'.

Looney Tunes, however...

So learning from these and many other sources of inspiration, I’ve decided to face my apprehension of backgrounds and props and attempt to grow my style through exploring inanimate objects and background subjects for each letter of the alphabet. C can not be for cat, for example…

I’ll only take about a half-hour on each topic, so they may not be full color or very complete. The point is to work quickly and not worry about completion, but to work on some variation in technique.

Without further ado, here is the first installment of the 26 Day Object Experiment, the highly predictable ‘A is for Apple’.:

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