Can you have too much of a good thing? I hope not, because my first paper cut in ages was definitely a good thing from my viewpoint. It was fun to do, and the results were attractive enough. Now that I’m in the paper cutting zone, so to speak, I thought I might as well exploit it and do something for the dawn of the new year.

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A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend when the topic turned to paper crafts and our mutual interest in them. She shared some gorgeous designs she’d come across for paper cuttings, which she had put up on her tumblr blog. I was a little surprised, because I had not heard paper cutting mentioned for a long time. In fact, I didn’t think I knew anyone personally who was even aware of the craft, let alone a fan of it.

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I started drawing more sketches very soon after my last session of pen drawings, within a few days in fact. I was in the mood. But after having looked at my last drawings, which were done with a fair amount of abandon, I started to think too much. The first drawing that followed (above) was stiff and over-done. Then I picked up another magazine for inspiration and tried again.

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I haven’t drawn in ages. Let me clarify. It’s not like I haven’t drawn anything recently, I draw doodles and thumbnails of things all the time. I’m a designer and a lot of my ideas come out in tiny visual sketches. But those are all documentary and explanatory drawings. I haven’t sat down and sketched anything purely for the sake of drawing in ages. Wanting to break the long famine of purely exploratory sketching, today I set out to do some pen drawings.

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All good things must come to an end, as does this edition of Comic Konga with this comic. I haven’t been the most punctual participant, but I’m glad I completed the set of five, and that too keeping to my parameters of using the same character. It’s been a great exercise and I will certainly tackle comics with less trepidation in the future. Anyone interested can subscribe to Vishal’s feed to know when the next one is happening.

Day 5: Love is in the Air, and our everyman robot is reacting in his own little predictably unpredictable way. The point of this one was to continue with the more complex scene setups, and to end with a straightforward caption piece. I’m quite happy with the finished visual because I had a specific look in mind and it took plenty of redraws to get it right.

The final, much erased and worked over, pencil sketch on A4 photocopy paper was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I hear love is a wonderful thing. And yet, everytime you see love visualised in images you see the same symbols and the same stale imagery. It gets to be very boring — to me at least. My try with this was to make an image about love that was not churned out by the Valentine’s Day marketing department, or by the Jilted Lovers Anarchist Cell. Is it romantic? No, probably not by most people’s standards. I do hope it is at least a little funny though and makes you smile.

Samir

With this, the fourth entry into Comic Konga, I’m practically on a roll. A major part of Vishal’s inspiration to start an event like this was to get people who are not regular practitioners into the flow of making comics. If you stick to it, I think Comic Konga succeeds in that very well.

Day 4: In Green Consumer Behaviour, our serial protagonist returns. I also return to multiple characters and dialogue with this one. I’m a fan of both the dialogue-based and the caption-centric single panel comic. I think they each have their charm, and one often works better than the other depending on the specific situation. I’m also exploring the medium a bit more and spreading my drawing wings by tackling more complex scenes. Staging is a lot of fun.

A pencil sketch on an A4 photocopy sheet was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I have tackled the issues of consumerism, consumer behaviour and the ever growing fad of green consumers in my writing before, but the topic is ever relevant and sometimes a single comic panel can communicate the situation as well, if not better, than long articles. Let’s face it, we’ve made a mess on this planet, and now a vast population of people think all of it can be undone purely my buying more stuff. Astounding!

Samir

The third entry into the latest Comic Konga event is here. A good sign since it’s one more than I managed to churn out the last time I took it on.

Day 3: Margin of Error, continues with my brown-paper-bag-robot character. He’s proven to be quite flexible and enjoyable so far and his further versatility remains to be explored as I put him through the paces in more situations. In addition to the repeat character, the other challenge I am taking on is to come up with only single panel comics. Like a short story, single panels are often more difficult to create than multi-panel narratives. This boiling down the point and the humour to it’s minimal essence can be a tough ask.

As always, the pencil sketch on an A4 photocopy sheet was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape before applying the blue tones and text.

This comic is meant to be about progress, growth, development, and the illusion of these. Living in a world and an age when we consider everything to be advanced and forever advancing, it’s nice to sometimes question our measures of progress.

Samir