Thursday, April 08, 2010

Shelving the people project

I'm putting an end to the people project.  It has been feeling not quite right but I couldn't tell why.  Then a friend sent me a link to Alison Bechdel talking about how she drew her wonderful (tragi)comic memoir, Fun Home, which is one of my favourite books.  Watching the clip I realised what's wrong with my people drawings.  They are too flat and lifeless.  It's more or less copying and not terribly exciting.  If all I want to do is copy photos, I think I've proven I can do that to a certain extent, so the project already feels defunct.

What I really want to do is start putting together drawings for my own graphic memoir.  I didn't think I was ready or had enough experience, but I just have to start.  And doing that is a lot more meaningful to me than copying faces from photos for the next three months.  I'm not going to put a time limit on this - it's going to be a huge effort.  I'm just going to work on it as and when and I may or may not share what I'm doing here.  But I will continue to draw whatever I like, whenever I like and post drawings here when I fancy it.  No artificial deadlines or undue pressure. 

I do have other project ideas though, projects that are not related to drawing, things I've been wanting to do for ages.  Now I can finally start!  I won't put a time limit on it either, unless it makes sense to do so.  I think I was trying to recreate some of the atmosphere of the original 100 days project with the whole 50 faces in a 100 days thing, but it didn't fit, and not only because I was the only person doing the project.  So...here's to doing things that fit.

1 comment:

Pagan Nun said...

Wow! I love the new look! Clearly I need to ask for help on doing something about mine. And I love the idea of doing "things that fit". I look forward to reading/seeing excerpts from your graphic memoir. I'm not sure when one ever has "enough experience" for a memoir. Things is, I think it depends who's reading/viewing it, right? There are many people who have not had as much experience as you in a lot of areas. And never exactly the same kind of experience. Sometimes the joy of reading a memoir is identifying with the experience that someone has written about.