Friday, December 28, 2007

Willworld page 35

I will try to post a little more regularly now that things have calmed down a bit. I like this idea of going through Seth's list of Illustration Tips, and looking at how he actually used them in his comic book pages. I am sure there are a lot of them I won't catch--some are just too subtle for me to realize that he is using, although I am sure the effects are there just the same. The sense of movement in a panel using 3-point perspective (Tip 10) for example. Would I notice the perspective? mmm, maybe not. Would I sense the movement? Yes, probably. And that is how it should be: you don't necessarily know WHY something works, but it does. But now I am going to go through his pages and look for the structural things that pertain to his tips.

Willworld is spectacularly full of all these things. Movement, timing, perspective...
I want to spend a few days on Tip 11: Use the distance between panels to carefully control timing.
The sense of time in Willworld is so wierd that Seth used every trick he could conjure in order to show that time was slowing and speeding, and going in circles, and in other directions entirely. In this page the upper row of panels gets longer and longer while the lower row gets shorter and shorter, giving us the odd sense of maybe something like an old phonograph record being played at slower and slower speed, where the sound gets lower and lower as things are happening that are farther and farther out of Hal's control.
Other pages, which I will continue to post, show time doing other strange things in this strange world that he has fallen into.

3 comments:

j_ay said...

Welcome back!
Your descriptions are really fun and perceptive. So how long before you start sitting at the drawing board yourself!!??

Another stunning page where Seth ‘directed’ every panel differently.

Vicki said...

Jay,
Actually I do draw, but looking at another person's work to see the structure within it is an entirely different skill, and one that I am only now honing as I look closely at Seth's pages. Before he died I knew his work was beautiful, but id not realize how intricate and many-faceted was the working inside of the pictures.

j_ay said...

I’d love to see some of your stuff, Vicki. If you don’t wish to air it in public, you have my email.

And yes, looking at someone else’s work *really* can open the eyes, and mind. The few comics I still read I am more or less studying, and not just reading.