Storybored

Twelve panels of my own life to display to the class? It was a narcissist's dream come true, because really, my life is so damned interesting and cool that I already have this urge to share it with everyone, and now I was being told to do that, specifically. A day, perhaps, is a limited time-frame in which to share all the facets of the incredible, jewel-like entity that is me, but I faced that challenge with my incredible resolve and set off to draw myself, at least several times.

The first day was spent simply noting the things I did in my normal routine, so I could paint an accurate picture of my time. Depressingly, despite all my slightly blurred recollections of supermodels and truffle oil, I found that I just rode the bus an awful lot. Also, mirrors. My gods, I stare at myself a lot. Any reflective surface will attract my attention and hold it for at least a few seconds of admiration and possible eyebrow waggling or winking. It's not that I think I'm the hottest thing on earth, mind you. It's just that I am generally prettier than my surroundings. Like, you know. The bus. Or some cars. Or anything else reflective and not already owning a pair of breasts.

But I digress.

So, a storyboard with just all scenes of me checking myself out was considered, but eventually abandoned, mostly because I figured I'd get annoyed trying to perfectly translate my lovely face to marker a dozen times, with diminishing success. So in my storyboard, I only check myself out twice.

I'm not going to bore you with the details, loyal reader, because they all boiled down to listed stuff, narrowed down, thumbnails drawn, photos taken, more thumbnails drawn, lightly sketched, drawn in marker because I suck at it most. I did go over the panels with a bit of white charcoal and some black pen, but otherwise that was it. For the whole thing. I totally forgot about captions until day of, and thought of borders too late, as well, so there are some hastily scrawled and partly legible things on.

Poses were hardest. My favorite panel, here, is a composite of three or four shots, and that was one of the simple ones. The rest, I must say, are varying degrees of suck. Part of it is the distortion on my camera lens, partly it was never having used markers, and partly it just took so damn long that I ended up half-assing the last few.

It ended up being classic and kinda boring. I didn't realize the extent of the freedom were would be allowed in both inventing and exaggerating scenes, but I've never been very good at pushing those boundaries, either. I tend to draw what I see, and do it very well, but making something deliberately exaggerated always was the same as deliberately wrong for me, and it's an annoying hurdle to get past. So although I tried to make things look interesting, by denying myself exaggeration I ended up having a less-interesting set of images than others. Mine was apparently a "classic marker comp. This is what storyboard artists used to spend all day doing," and although that was said with an approving nod, it still seemed a bit dull.

So here they are, and I'm sorry for the terrible quality. No working scanner, as yet, so these are bad call-phone pictures. You know, like everything else on this site.