The Saga of Spot the Snail

In Making Comics, Scott McCloud identifies six basic panel transitions that are used to convey stories in comics. For our first assignment in our comics workshop we were to draw one example of each of these transitions in three panels each. The first one listed here was a random idea that then took over the rest of the panels (with the exception of the final one, which is more of an exercise in absurdity) to form a mini-story which I have titled The Saga of Spot the Snail. There's more information about the six transitions at Scott McCloud's web site.

These quick sketches were later hand inked when I first bought my pens and wanted to ink everything I could get my hands on. Nothin' special, just wanted to throw some black lines down so it would pick up better on the scan. The pages later got crinkled in the great room shift of last weekend. Hence weirdness.

Moment to Moment


Subject to Subject



Action to Action



Scene to Scene


Aspect to Aspect



Non Sequitur Transition

A Promise of Updates to Come

Having just finished Bone by Jeff Smith (amaaaazing!) and Making Comics, by Scott McCloud, and with the approach of the end of the comics storytelling workshop coming up, I'll probably be working on (and posting) a lot of fun comics-related things soon. I have some exercises from earlier in the workshop that I want to post, so look for those soon.

Also, read Bone. In addition to being probably my favorite graphic novel to date, it's also now very high on the list of favorite books ever, comix or otherwise.

Stuff From Comix Workshop

I am currently participating in a student-run workshop called Comics Storytelling, and I'm exploring lots of exciting ideas and improving my skills in fun ways. Also, I just recently bought my first pens specifically for inking (a Sakura Micron 08 and Sakura brush pen) and I've been experimenting a lot over the past couple of days with them. Thus we get this one-page comic, which was originally an exercise in expressive body language for our characters, which I then inked for the experience and attempted to create some nice background detail (a la Jeff Smith). I think I overdid it a bit with the small lines, but hey, this is a learning process. Beyond that, there are also a number of extraneous ink-lines that I would remove, but it didn't seem worth it at this juncture, so if you notice a flaw, good for you.

Also, this is a scan of a photocopy (the original was too big to fit on the current scanner being used, as it was made on 11x15 Bristol.) The 65% photocopy looked great. The scan of the photocopy looks a little less great, but you get the idea. I'm going to figure out a way to get it with much better quality sometime later.