Creating Comics is hard. Part 1: drawing.

Drawing is bloody hard but also great fum

Character design, plot, look, action, dialogue, underlining themes and a vast sea of other points are up for consideration when setting about designing a comic book.

Starting this process over a year ago I haven't eve scratched the surface of knowledge needed to become a proficient comic book artist. I am of course referring to creating a whole comic book, not just the inking or colouring or lettering, everything. 

Approaching this in sizable chunks I decided to start where I think is most appropriate, at the start. Drawing. 

I'm not the best artist, thanks in part to my high school art teacher saying i was shit, but I always enjoyed it. Digging into it I don't think I ever really appreciated how much goes into drawing. Form, positioning,  perspective and most importantly expression all make up a good drawing. I bought books and started my long journey to having something that didn't resemble a stick figure. 

But I wasn't getting anywhere. I was drawing lots yes, but it was starting to be grind. My savior was art class. Here was a bunch of people from all walks of life who got together because of a love of creating something, even if it did look like a pile of poo. The environment was friendly and supportive, and I loved it. 

Being the crappy artist I was compelled to a class that had something along the lines of if you can write your name you can draw. Sweet I thought i can most of the time read my own hand writing, other ppl have trouble though.  Off to school with a nervous smile I went.

Art shops are foreign places to me. I would feel more comfortable in a mechanics shop talking about cars and I know nothing about how they work (something I would like to change). Anyway here i was talking about paper texture and thickness and all the different pencils and what not you could buy. Sweet I thought I will buy heaps of gear like the pros have and in no time i'll be pro. 

Unfortunately drawing skill doesn't level up like in video games. You can't buy a new pen and go from stick figures to something so expressive it makes you laugh or cry. It just makes your stick figures look better. 

Technique I thought, knowledge is the answer. So i delved into finding as many art books as I could, to make my nose look like a nose and my eyes not completely soulless. Coming from a technical background in engineering my brain told me the way to solve problems was through understanding how something worked by breaking it down into parts.

The problem with this idea is that the art doesn't work like that. I had forgotten that part that art is expressive and emotive. I was grinding my way through art books drawing everything in them thinking it would make me better. Yes it made me better at drawing batman in a specific pose, but what happened if i wanted to move his arm a bit, or change his pose. I was buggered.

Taking a couple of days off I rediscovered why I enjoyed drawing and particularly why I'm drawn to create my own graphics novel, even if my mum and close friends are the only ones to read it, because I love storytelling and world creating. Just grabbing a pen and paper and drawing something that represents something is great fun even if most of the time it looks nothing like the original form. 

I now believe learning to draw is as much about the process of training your hand and brain as it is about feeling what you are drawing, connecting with it emotionally. That sounds wishy washy but drawings are infinitely better when your heart is in the drawing. 

Wearing your heart on the page is a hard ask but it is worth it for the end results.

NBN Debate Labor Vs Liberal Infographic

Lets put an end to drone warfare.

US lead drone strikes from 2004 have killed an estimated 1 967 to 3 299 people in Pakistan alone with up to 890 of those killed children.

Known in Afghanistan as benghai which according to a  recent Times article means "buzzing of flies" in Pashto, the local language in a remote corner of Afghanistan. 

These unmanned vehicles are favoured by the US military because they allow the pilots to remotely control them from a comfy air conditioned office thousands of Kilometres away.

It's another step in dehumanising war, further removing the person doing the killing from the actual act. Numerous stories in the press have highlighted the number of schools and family homes destroyed in this ongoing war.

It is time that militaries around the world re-think the way they engage with remote villages. If your family was sitting at home enjoying dinner and some foreigner dropped bombs on your house, you would be pissed to.

Then we wonder why radical groups ever form. Why would they want to bomb us we ask. Put yourself in these people's shoes, about as far away from the well heeled halls of Washington DC as you can get.

Intersection of lives

Facing a choice between different lives that I have lead over the last couple of years I decided that to help me through the decision making process I would draw out what I was thinking. 

I started with trying to describe the different work I have done and how they have effected me. Due to culture and just enjoying booze way to much I decided that I had to include alcohol in some form. I settled on a bottle as I tend to drink mostly beer and it just seemed to fit well. It also is the common theme across most parts of my life.

The different worlds of my working life and how they are related. Pencil on paper.

Next was figuring out how to represent my time working as a network (computer) engineer, my learning to become a journalist and the fun and satisfaction I got from drawing and (trying) to create comics.

The idea of the pen struck me as a time honoured symbol of journalism so I decided on the trusty old ink pen. 

For comics and drawing the choice was easy, the pencil. I love the form it represents and how you can draw on any old piece of paper you have laying around. It is also anti technology, unshackling me from a monitor and keyboard which is something I find quite appealing having worked as a network engineer for a few years.

How to represent technology was a tricky one. I decided upon the CAT5 cable for a few reasons. One because it represents my time as a  network engineer but it is also a symbol of how technology has enabled all my other pursuits to come together. If it wasn't for technology I probably would have never discovered comics, rediscovered my love for drawing and my love of journalism. 

The choice to wrap the cable around the bottle was chosen to represent my love hate relationship with technology. On the one hand it has given me so much inspiration as symbolised by the ooze coming out of the bottom of the cable. On the other hand it sometimes strangles the life out of what I love, creating habits and barriers that are hard to break and get in the way of my goals and aspirations. 

Late within the sketching stage I settled on the idea of the objects resting on a book because of the symbolism of a book. Knowledge and what that represents. Learning is so important to all of us I couldn't leave it out. If i could be a full time uni student for the rest of my life I would be a very happy person. I love buying and reading and just the perspective and ideas that it provides.

I knew from the beginning that the colours would revolve black/dark blue. This is due to the depression  or blues I sometimes face and wanted to reflect that somehow. The white/skin colour bottle seemed to make sense because alcohol seems so pure and innocent but it really can have some ill effects on us, hence the old and dirty look to it. I then applied this dirt to everything other than the book to also represent the grittiness and struggle I face in my chosen professions. Brown was chosen because of the organice feel of wood and that seemed to work well with the pencil. Orange was chosen for the cable because it is quite vibrant and energetic.

I am really happy with the end result and ended up framing it for my desk. It was good practise while I continue with my dream of creating a graphic novel.

Thanks for reading :)

The end result on my desk. 

Resources for Journalists/Researchers

Here is a collection of links that should assist Australian Journalists or Researchers, or anyone for that matter that needs to find out some information more detailed than just a quick Google search.

All links have been taken from the book Release the Hounds: A Guide to Research for Journalists and Writers By Christine Fogg. It is a great book I recommend you buy it if interested in how to gather information.

Be Skeptical/Critical about the information you find. Weigh up its quality.

Use both Primary and Secondary Sources:

Secondary: info that has been selected or processed, magazines, newspapers, broadcast transcripts, reference books, biographie, charts and maps.
Primary: people, marriage and divorce records, Hansard (the record of what is said in parliament) letters, diaries, survey results, menus, interviews.

• Background info can be found in newspapers, archives, press releases and online communities. 
• Big news can be found in news specials such as www.smh.com.au/specials
• To find out significant events unfolded check out Keesing’s Record of World Events (Longman, London)
• Profiles, Obits, Biographies.
• Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne University Press)
• Find if they have a website: Google, www.aussie.com.au
• www.whitepages.com.au or business in www.yellowpages.com.au
• Find them on electoral role www.aec.gov.au
• Check professional associations they might be apart of through Directory of Australian Associations, Associations on the Net www.ipl.org/ref/aon or www.associationcentral.com
• If the person is creative check ScreenSound www.screensound.gov.au
• If the person is in business check annual reports and newsletters.
• Property they own should be on land title records
• Donations they made is recorded on Parliamentary pecuniary interest registers.
• If they are famous libraries might hold writings they made.
• Oral histories found on Australia’s Oral History collections: a National Directory www.nla.gov.au/ohdir
• If served in the armed forces check war memorial www.awm.gov.au office of war graves www.dva.gov.au/commem/oawg/wargr.htm or commonwealth war graves commission www.cwgc.org
• Family history look at Death and marriages Registries www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/bdmaus , www.familysearch.com , www.genealogy.com Australian Genealogical society www.sag.org.au

• Local sources: 
• look at graves www.internment.net/aus/index.htm , 
• local libraries gateway www.nla.gov.au/libraries, 
• Encyclopaedia Australia (Aust Geographic Society, Sydney) also contains local histories, and 
• Gazetter of Australia www.auslig.gov.au/mapping/names/natgaz.htm for places names from past times. 
• Local societies for good images, clothes and tools www.localhistory.ymrl.org.au/resources.htm Other image sources include Aust National Maratine Museum www.anmm.gov.au and Australian Galleries and Museums online www.amol.org.au/collection and National Archives www.naa12.naa.gov.au
• Dictionary of Australian Bushrangers for naughty relatives.

Search site:gov.au or edu.au
whois search to show who owns the domain www.apnic.net to establish validity of info

As I find more links I'll add them here.

My new website, OwlEmpire.com

The past year a few mates and I have been plugging away at developing a new website. It isn't the new twitter or Facebook, and doesn't contain any special technology that hasn't been seen before.

Instead it is a music review website.

There are thousands if not more of these kind of websites around. Ours in different, because we designed the kind of website that we would like to visit.

The first problem we see with most music review websites is the amount of waffle. They go on and on about what they ate for breakfast and how the dog really liked the third song. Does anyone other than the writer and maybe the editor even care? Because I know I don't. So I don't read them.

My viewing habits of music review websites tend to involve seeing which albums they rate highly, then going to YouTube and listening to there most popular or interesting song. If I like what I hear I'll go get the album. For this reason we put the music videos of there best song in the review, with links to Spotify so that you can listen to the entire album.

Writing about a medium that uses a different sense to me is quite odd, you can't explain in adequate detail how music makes you feel.

So we with our website decided to try something different. We wanted to explore the idea of expressing where you should listen to the album. People are pretty good judges of if an album is good, I know I don't need to be told if an album is good, i can judge that myself. Granted having some kind of rating system does address the problem of noise. Noise meaning the massive amount of music out there, and knowing what to listen to is quite daunting.

Owlempire is our attempt at showing the best albums of all time, not mentioning the crap ones, and doing it in such a way that you haven't spent half your day listening to me (the writer) waffle on and on and on (kind of like this post haha).

Anyway it should be fun.

Jumping Without Looking.

Have you ever made a huge life change, just because it seemed like a good idea? Then got half way down that road and wondered 'maybe i should have taken the other path'. This happened to me.

As a kid we use to go to the big city. I was a country boy and loved nothing more than going swimming in the river, pulling practical jokes on my mates by example lighting the tree house up the bush on fire (nearly causing a few bush fires and definitely a few headaches, sorry mum) and just living in a relaxed and carefree environment. I would point at the huge skyscrapers in the city and say 'one day mum, i'll work in a skyscraper like that'. I believed I would too. Who wouldn't I thought to myself, if you work in these huge buildings you must be really important, driving fast cars and living a brilliant and exciting life.

I grew up. I never really entended to end up where I did, but I did end up in the large skyscrapers I had yearned to be apart of as a young teenager. Except it was quite different to what I thought it would be. I was a young Network Engineer, working on all the latest and greatest problems, working for an exciting and innovative company. But I was bored. I really liked my co-workers, but their was no get out of bed enthusiasm, especially on cold mornings.

So I plodded along. I became sad, wallowed in my own self pity. Then thanks to my partner we decided to make a change.

I jumped. I jumped from Network engineering, working on specific problems and errors, to journalism, a field I had no interest in and couldn't possibly even begin to understand why I had chosen it. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. And it was awesome. I had found something that catered to my interests and abilities, something that fostered my curious nature, something I could dig into a topic to understand how it worked, just for the sake of it.

It wasn't what I chose that was important, it was that I had made a change in my life. A change to better myself, to challenge myself. For if I hadn't I would still be sitting in that cubicle watching the dreary weather roll in, wondering why I didn't ever do anything exciting. I found the unexpected was exciting.