Behind the Scenes / Q&A with Sarah

I have a question too

Who are your artistic influences?

Hi Sarah!

You have a really great scrapbooking aesthetic that comes through in your work. What is your process when creating? Where and how do you stock your source material?

Hi Sarah, I am wondering if Cat is an orphan... or where is her Mother?

I'll start this off with numbers:
1. Whenever I have a deadline, there's always an element of seeing it as work involved. The mindmap stopped being fun right up at the end, because I was working with so many layers and having a hard time keeping track of where the layer I needed to make changes to was. Going through over 80 layers and turning each one off to see what was on it was not fun! As long as budget for plenty of time when I have a challenging page to do, though, I love it.

2. When I first started college in 1999, the Sequential Art department had only 24 female students. By the time it was 2002, there were a lot more, mostly brought into comics because of the popularity of manga at the time. The faculty (at the time it was entirely male with one exception who started teaching in 2002) was nothing but supportive and encouraging, but when it came to the male students, there were two very clear camps; the ones who were fine with having an increasing amount of girls in their classes and the ones who weren't. Friends of mine who are going to SCAD now in the same major are astounded whenever I tell this story, not to mention, the department has more female professors and at least 50% of the students are girls. This, to me, is very reflective of what's happening in the industry. Comics in America started out as an old boys' club and so much of that is still in evidence. However, there's a lot of new, young, female blood out there who are determined to make their artistic visions heard. The internet has been really instrumental in making this more of a reality. I do believe that getting into mainstream comics as a woman is (marginally) less of a challenge as it would have been in, say, the 1980s, but there's still a very long way to go. Women artists and writers have a lot more visibility in indie comics or webcomics, or with smaller publishers than when I was in college, and that's great to see.

3. I got into reading comics thanks to Batman! When I was about 5, my parents gave me a set of Betamax videos of the late 1960s Batman and Aquaman cartoons. Actually obtaining comics themselves was a bit of a challenge in Saudi Arabia in the 80s (you can get Marvel, DC and Archie comics a lot easier there today!), but I used to get subscriptions and send them to my grandparents in the States.

4. How much time do you have? ;D
I decided to undertake a Ph.D. when I got to the end of my Master's and finally had time to get back into reading comics. The critical thinking skills I'd acquired over the two years of my Master's had changed the way I approached narrative in a huge way. I've been a mythology geek since the age of 3 (I had a babysitter who was majoring in Greek mythology and she kept me entertained for hours!) and the parallels between superhero narratives and mythic hero narratives were something I kept noticing to the point that I wanted to study it. From there, I narrowed the focus of my study to how (male) heroes are reflections of a culture's social/political preoccupations and their ideals of masculinity.

As for what the experience was like, I'll share the personal reflection chapter from my thesis itself:
My comprehension of storytelling conventions, techniques and methods has expanded to such an extent that I now perceive the underlying narrative structure of a tale within moments of encountering it. Without trying, I also take into account the time period the work was created in and try to place the work into its cultural context. What this has done is strengthen the structure of my own narrative work and assisted me in thinking objectively on the reasons why I have made particular storytelling decisions. It has also reinforced my ability to contextualise visual media forms.

MetaMan’s original contribution to knowledge has not been restricted to the software and its uses; it is not confined to the act of practice-based research. On personal, philosophical and professional levels, I have gained insight, wisdom, personal growth and development than I had ever imagined in was possible for anyone, artist or otherwise, to achieve. Before MetaMan, I required certain conditions to be met if I were to approach working in unfamiliar media. As with my reasons for starting a Batman collection (see Appendix 1), I would begin with exhaustive research of the medium, including its history, evolution, its most prominent practitioners’ biographies and every recorded variation on it so far. After that, I would collect my materials, test them out and only after feeling I could proceed without the final product ending in disaster would I start the work in earnest. The resulting product would generally be of very high quality in terms of execution, so I maintained that I had happened upon a fail-proof modus operandi for my art and saw no reason to change my approach, until the drive to create the MetaMan resource threw my previous methods into both question and disarray.
This project may explore the superhero’s evolution and perceptions, but through it, my artistic process and perceptions of myself have evolved as well.

This work of art is one I would not have done differently, given the opportunity. The high standard of artwork I had already produced before learning ActionScript 3.0 motivated me to keep learning the programming language to realise my vision.
I have grown more perceptive, of myself and the world around me. I am no longer intimidated by difficult, untried techniques and experiences, professionally and personally. I have faced the struggle between art and artist. I have experienced the battle of imagined capabilities versus actual ones and learned how to evenly match them, challenging myself while still maintaining my health and focus. As a result, I feel wiser and more adept at creating art as well as living.

In reflecting upon and writing about MetaMan’s evolution, I realise that it would not have occurred in a way that was beneficial on artistic and personal levels if technology, design and the magnitude of my own ideas had presented me with a straightforward work of art. The artistic, technological and theoretical challenges this project presented me with galvanised me to approach them wholeheartedly and this resulted in a strong and well-rounded work of art unlike any I have produced before.

Alphonse Mucha is a huge one, so is Erte and Dave McKean. Recently, I've been taking a lot of cues from how Alison Bechdel handles inking, and the way Terry Moore isn't afraid to show varieties of body types on his female characters and allows them to display emotions that don't always make them look pretty.

Thank you so much! And thank you, Suze, who I am also answering here.

My process is really involved! I hope the attachment loads, because it's a pretty thorough documentation. I start off with a sketch, based on Will's script, then I start collecting materials. My source materials are pulled from all over the place; Dover clipart books, free online textures, things I have lying around the house, and my stock of sewing supplies (I make dolls and their outfits, and tend to hoard interesting fabrics, trims and charms). I also hoard interestingly-textured papers from all over the world.
The pointing finger charms on the cover are an example of this, and the fabric I used for Cat's blue dress swatch on the mindmap is actually scanned from a Marks & Spencer skirt of mine! I do all kinds of alterations to the source materials in terms of levels, saturation, color balance, etc, until I get the right feel.

I will reposition things if I don't feel they're working out, or if Will suggests that I do! Hopefully you can see where I did that in the mindmap development picture I'm attaching.

BREAKING NEWS: I picked up some papers I plan to use in Issue 2's mindmap this week