The two invisible steps before you make something
When I made comic strips in the past I would often jump straight into drawing the first panel. I’d just wing it and then improvise each following panel. Sometimes it worked out.
An improvised strip from my old series “Us with plants on our heads.”
But often it just turned into nonsensical crap.
I don’t get this one myself.
I often started drawing a strip and gave up cause I didn’t know what to do.
I thought I was supposed to be able to fart out great comics with ease. But I squeezed and squeezed. I was too eager. Without being aware of it, I tried to do 3 steps all at once. To continue this (f)art metaphor - before anything comes out of you, you’ve gotta 1. find something you want to eat, 2. digest it, 3. let it come out. The problem was that I hadn’t eaten or digested anything.
To put it in a more dignified way.
The first step is to search,
the second is to make sense of,
I used to skip the first two steps, I wanted to get straight into making shit. But that often turned into nonsensical crap, or I would run into a wall and give up.
The third step (to make it) is the most obvious one. Despite it being the most obvious step, I got completely stuck on it because I hadn’t gone through the first two.
If you are reading this, it’s likely you already know how to make something. I think these first two steps are identical no matter what medium you are creating in. So I will take the liberty of not going into detail about how to make something.
Instead of trying to think of products first, what any creative person should try to do is think, search and wonder. Think about real things, notice what makes you feel stuff - what is close to your heart if everything else is stripped away? Ideally projects will emerge from the collection of the thoughts you have collected, or at least be designed/conceived in a way that can package your thoughts as nicely as possible.
There’s nothing quite as uninspiring as a blank canvas. 85% of the time a blank canvas only makes me feel dread or boredom. If you come up with a great idea while looking at a canvas it’s not because you looked at a canvas, it’s despite looking at it. Whatever great ideas I have managed to conjure while looking at that white rectangle has always come from something else - an inspiring movie scene, something from my day, a lingering thought, or a line from a song.
Now I’ve abandoned blank canvases, I never start from one. Neither when I write or draw.
Instead, I live in search of noteworthy thoughts. Regardless of whether you know what a thought will be useful for, jot them down somewhere.
To search is just to live life with a keen eye, ear and heart and to make sure you don’t forget.
When I stare at a blank canvas The Search becomes stressful and I want to avoid it. But in reality, if I admit that The Search is part of the process, it becomes the most peaceful and interesting step of them all. It’s just living with a secret mission - to be human and to find out what’s special about that to you.
And of course you need to make sure you don’t forget those thoughts for the next step.
Now that you’ve been out in the world and discovered stuff, it’s time to sit down somewhere, sift through and examine your haul. You might be overwhelmed by how much is in there. You’ll never be able to use everything. So you just gotta use your intuition. See what stands out, group things, talk with someone - do ANYTHING you want with it until you find what’s hiding there.
Your notes are a collection of countless puzzles. Some puzzles are hundreds of pieces big, others are just one or three. Some pieces fit into more than one puzzle. You don’t know. Often you’ll have to find a few pieces in your head to complete a puzzle, while other pieces might still be hidden out there in the world.
The way to make sense of a puzzle is to try to put it together, or to be literal; try to explain it as clearly as you can. Ask yourself, “how can I prove to someone else that this is true?” And ideally not just make them understand it, but also feel it. That’s the puzzle you gotta solve.
Let me give you an example.
I found myself frustrated that we live life too much through screens and I want to make a Space Deer comic strip. That’s the idea I want to make sense of and the filter that I will examine my idea through.
First I will ask myself, “ok, why is that idea true?”- I think life needs balance, you shouldn’t stare too much of it away through a pixelated representation of it. Then I ask myself, “how should we live then?”- We should go outside and get our boots in the mud more, what we will really remember is probably gonna happen out there. And then I try to think of a situation where I can show as clearly as possible that this is right. I’m afraid this message might be tired or preachy, especially if I would aim the message directly at someone like us (you know, someone who’s currently looking at a screen). Luckily the imagery of my comic gives me other symbols to play with.
So I thought of how I could show that in four comic panels and wrote down this.
Space Deer walks on a desolate planet.
They encounter a mars rover.
They scream “get out here and live!!”
NASA people see Space Deer through their screens.
It’s simple, but it gets the idea across. Normally I would like to make it clear that Space Deer is really out there and living freely, to show what these researches are missing out on. But in the comic we will see Space Deer explore and go on all kinds of adventures, so that’s something I didn’t feel like I needed to put more emphasis on. I trust the reader to make that connection themself.
Sometimes making sense of an idea can be much harder, in this example the idea was an entire puzzle on its own, or maybe I had the remaining pieces in my head already. Sometimes all you need is just one piece in front of you to know where to look for the rest.
And then of course the last step is to just make it. (Step 4 is to share it. Step 5 is to repeat it.)
I have made decent comic strips despite jumping straight into drawing, or so I’ve thought. Thinking back on it, I just managed to search and make sense of an idea as I was drawing. I didn’t magically skip two steps, that’s impossible. I was just not aware of what I was doing.
Now that I know the steps, I’m much better at understanding why I tend to get stuck in different parts of the process.
In reality these steps are not always as clear cut. They will blend into each other, you might do some back and forth, making sense of and making something is a fuzzy line. This is not so much a step-by-step process as it is a journey you have to go through. It has definitely helped me to be more methodical and intentional about it though. I’ve set myself up in a way where it’s fun for me to get each step done. I might go into that in the future.
If you only take one thing with you from this - I hope it’s that you will be aware of and feel more at peace with the first two steps.
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Thank you for reading my thoughts!
