'Making Comics' by Lynda Barry

For the last month, I've been working through Lynda Barry's workshop-in-a-book titled "Making Comics".  It is actually based on her college class in which students, from novice to skilled artists, learn to make comics. 

Her approach to this subject has everything to do with noticing your life and experiences within it.  It also involves not being embarrassed about making child-like drawings.  Starting out, students create a 'selfie' image following Ivan Brunetti's method for drawing simple characters. It's this character students use for their selfie and daily diary exercises.  I've created one for my work too.  While amassing one's collection of works using this character, it's fun to see how there is a sense of continuity from one image to another.  That's not to say the character looks the same in each exercise.  But isn't that true of us?  We don't look the same every day either.  We change in 'look' from one day to another through the clothes we choose to wear, how our hair is styled, how our make-up or lack thereof changes our appearance as well as the impacts from our health, the amount of sleep we get, our mood, etc.     

These are a few examples from my work.  The first two are from selfie exercises from prompts (taking 3 minutes) while the bottom image is work from a daily diary effort (which has to take a minimum of 5 minutes). The selfie prompts are usually offbeat like 'tunneling to freedom', riding a bird'. etc.  They are meant to be offbeat with the goal of inviting creativity into the process.  

I'm almost halfway through the book and have a lot more work to do.  Though the benefit, so far, has been worth the slow movement through it.  By the way, Lynda is a very good and inventive teacher (as well as having been a MacArthur Fellow).