November 30th, 2019

Marylin Chiaverina, Illustration and Visual Media.

​For the last few months I have been focusing on my self-initiated project Lin Trips. Here is the Brief:
I plan to create this webcomic by collecting from memories or talking to my family about theirs to form the short narratives. I plan to publish these on Webtoon, a platform for self-published comics, which is easily accessible both in the UK and outside.
My webcomic will be in a Tim Burton’s style mixed with my own as I believe this will make the webcomic peculiar enough to be noticed and will also represent me as a person and push my art skills further as I usually not use this style of drawing for projects. The artwork will be both created digitally and analogue as I believe some of the markings/colours are beautiful and fit the art style well, and will be advantaged by the digital work, I would also like to experiment further to decide the ratio between the two.

Lin Trips was born from my desire to create a webcomic and my Thematic Project: Migration as a Graphic Narratives where I have explained what brought my family in the UK.
The characters I created for the project were all happily excepted by my family. As a result, I decided to spend more time on them so they could look decent.

​These are the initial designs sketches.
The sketching was a challenge. As a perfectionist I had problems remembering that I should have fun not stress myself out. The book: ‘Things You Think In A Bar’ by Tim Burton made me finally calm down and stop stressing on how everything needs to be 100% perfect.
In every step of the way on recreating the final designs I had constant feedback from my mum and sister, as they were their representations. This process was both stressful but also rewarding since the feedback was always supportive.

The next step was the title design. Here a few:

​Thinking back this part was the most experimental out of all the work I done so far, not sure if that is a good thing.
The tape title won the favour of everyone that I showed it to, so it become the template for the official title.

​Reflecting on this, the choice was perfect. The design suits Lin Trips well. I believe so because the title represents me, on how clumsy it looks and how it is straight up in the title: Lin Trips, it supposed to be messy and experimental.

Collecting stories can be time consuming as I am a chatterbox when I start talking. This brought a small delay. The first time I had to go through the process of asking my family if they had any funny stories to tell resulted in me talking over an hour with my mum. Taking notes was even worse because my handwriting is messy and sometimes, I struggle to read it as well.

Emotion sketching was relaxing and turned out to be greatly helpful when it come down to me creating the webcomic. Here some:

The first episode: Introduction had an awkward and time-consuming way of making. It started with small visual to help me create better sketch layouts, I made four of them. These would have been copied, two panels per page. Next recopied onto tracing paper to be scanned in, the next step was to make it digital and fixed up on Photoshop. The reason why I chooses this software over than Illustrator is because I like the first one’s brushes collection more.

​When completed I tried and failed to colour the first panel, this backfired as you can see:

​After this I decided to go less extravagant and do a black, white, and red colouring. This was a good second plan as it looks nice and fits the style of Lin Trips better than the first attempt.
This episode had a lot of errors and it took a lot of work and time to be completed. I am planning to fix and republish this when I have time to spare.

​The Second Episode: The Mirror Accident had the same formula as the one before, but this time around I was only able to create three different layouts for it.

​The other difference was my unsuccessful attempt to create one page out of the several one-page panel I have been working on.

​This too will be corrected later one when I have time.
From week 4 onward the layouts and style were set. I dropped the coping in bigger two panels in one-page system I had and the tracing paper altogether to create panels as the story required instead to have a set measurement. The ‘formula’ now used to create them is: get the first sketching done while reading the story, then modify them in a panel sequence. Show people the end results and ask them to choose, take the successful layout and modify it on Photoshop, shade it in, sign it and prof read it before publishing the episode.

I am currently using this way of working as it is quicker than the previous one. This is in case if something happens, for example I got stuck and having a few lateness for publishing the episodes, this style makes it easier to catch up.

Failed episodes.
I currently own 3 unpublished episodes. This is because not all make sense and/or are funny. One does not make any sense in the English language, one can be funny only with a wider context, the last one does not make sense to other people. These examples did slow down my production a lot unfortunately.

​Next Step:
I will read more carefully what has been suggested on the review of the formative assessment and make choices based on them.