My Evolving Process
SERIOUSLY, HOW THE F#*K DOES ONE DRAW FIRE?
      The only time I’ve ever lit a match, I threw it in the sink because I was scared when it lit on fire. Due to my arthritis I cannot manage to use a regular lighter and actually start the flame. I am not a boy scout and therefore do not posses the ability to start a fire by rubbing sticks together. I am not a wizard so I cannot magically start a fire. All in all, the ability for me to see fire as a visual is incredibly difficult if not impossible. Fahrenheit 451 is a book centered around fire. I am supposed to adapt this book into a comic and ultimately draw fire. You may start to see my problem, when you can’t see fire: How does one draw fire?
      When trying to figure out how to draw fire I had to look to the Internet for information. My search history is now a conglomeration of searches like: Fire drawing, video of fire, firefighters, fire. I fear that I may have not only improved my artistic abilities in this task but also my name ranking on an FBI list of arsonists somewhere. My biggest conclusion was that people draw a horned spire and outline it in orange or red to draw fire. It is usually a full fire that feels like it’s boasting about it’s size. I didn’t want the fire in my comic to feel like this. I wanted my fire to be elegant and transparent.  Fire isn’t a set in stone object its ever-changing and malleable. This decision to complicate the normal standard for drawing fire further complicated my question: How do I want to draw my fire?
      I decided that my fire wouldn’t just be a color fill it would be a series of colored lines. This artistic style would make the piece look like it was dancing, the fire became it’s own entity on the page. The commanding focus of the fire made me decide that the rest of the page should depend on the light of this flame. The page would be a bas color of black and the fire would make the picture appear from it. Instead of black lines to draw I used red and orange to show how this fire illuminates the setting and the story itself.
How does one draw fire?
However the heck they want.
Journal Entry 9: "Things I've Learned/ Things to Steal”
For this entry, I’ve decided to use Bethany’s adaptation project.
What interested me most, besides her fantastic art, was her panel layout and page construction for this project. On this title page and in the rest of her adaptation comic, Bethany uses each page in a layout not seen in traditional comic form. The emphasis on backgrounds, the page itself functioning as a panel, and the highlighting of certain elements through their massive size creates a very dynamic and cinematic feel.
I experimented with alternate page layouts in my adaptation project, and I really enjoyed. In my final project, I’d like to have at least one page that isn’t traditionally done. Throughout the course, I’ve enjoyed playing around with the traditional page structures, and Bethany’s work is an idealization of what I’d like mine to look like.
