Sigune's How Not To Draw Comics - Part XII
It has been more than two months since my last comics entry (ouch!), and meanwhile, Rufftoon a. k. a. Johane Matte has brought out the fanbook, with seventeen of my Snape pages plus The Young Potions Master in it. Squee! I’m incredibly proud - the booklet looks so pretty and features b/w comics and drawings by fan artists whom I admire very much, like Laurence Péguy, kyla79, and of course Johane Matte herself :D. It turns out I’m the only gloomypants in the collection; all other comics are funny *g*…
Other exciting news is that my original four-page comic The Useless Resurrection, based on Wilde’s story of the same name, is in the pipeline for publication in the new comics magazine Het Salon. When? I dunno. Will it happen at all? I dunno either. But signs of interest always perk me up :D.
Anyway: it’s time for page ten!
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
Page Seven
Page Eight
Page Nine
You Are Here:
During a visit to the library, Sirius has made sure that Snape overheard the Marauders’ arrangements to meet by the Whomping Willow on a night with a full moon. He has also revealed the tree’s mechanism, counting on Snape’s curiosity and hatred getting the better of his common sense. And indeed, the rising full moon finds the Slytherin sneaking out of Hogwarts…
16. Mood and Music
Someone asked me a few months ago about the craziest thing I had ever done as a Snape fangirl. Now, I don’t do a lot of really crazy things, because I’m too shy and easily embarrassed and a bit closeted besides; I’d certainly never, say, dress up as a Potter character, especially not as Snape - for myself, I would find that too weird for words. But perhaps I did a much more radical thing: I entirely changed my day-to-day style.
I really am a perfectionist, and most things I do I want to do thoroughly. Oscar Wilde would say that is a typically feminine thing: I don’t have passing fancies; my love affairs are always serious and profound :D. When I am interested in something, I am deeply interested and immerse myself totally in information and atmosphere. That is an absolute requisite if I am to be productive and create something decent from my inspiration. I will read the right books, watch the right films and listen to the right music; I will visit the right places and use the right models for my pictures and prose. Chances are that I will start to dress accordingly as well. Mind you, I have never dressed like a Victorian, and I am not dressing like a witch right now; but before I got interested in Snape, I had perhaps one single black item of clothing in my wardrobe, and these days I have plenty. Just like I learned to appreciate the properties and possibilities of black in my pictures, I learned about what it could mean to my look ;-). Like my drawings, my clothes have become predominantly black, red, white and grey. My accessories, too, change with my creative phases, and I have moved from Celtic knotwork jewellery to silk neckties to black fingerless gloves.
The colour and detail was one thing, but documenting myself for a story about wizards was another. I could not do my usual historical research, as the universe I was working about is to a large extent fictional. Sadly but true, Snape doesn’t exist, so I can’t read his letters and his favourite novels, or visit his place of birth. Of course magic, whether it is real or not, and whether one believes in it or not, is a popular subject in most cultures, so there really is a lot of material to be found about it. Personally, I have always been fascinated with it, even though I do not believe in it at all. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen I was very much into tarot and incense and practical magic and read a lot about Wicca, modern druidism and the like. I also devoured a steady number of fantasy novels, preferably featuring wizards and witches. However, because Rowling’s Potterverse feels nothing like all that, this background was not of much use to me, apart from the fact that it told me what not to do. Instead, I started to read up on the Gothic subculture, which I thought extremely interesting because of its worship of black, the timeframe in which it came into existence, and its flirtation with magic and magical beings; plus, Snape has a partly Muggle background after all, so adding some Muggle subcultural elements to the mix seemed fun. I don’t think that Snape is a Goth, as I have seen people suggest here and there, but books like Nancy Kilpatrick’s The Goth Bible did help me, during the first phases of the comic, to determine the kind of atmosphere I wanted. I also gave young Snape his combat boots after reading that book, and when I picture him, I have an idea of a cross between Goth and punk at the back of my mind.
As for music, I never listen to any while writing or drawing; I find it distracting, and I need to concentrate when I am creating something. However, when I am inking - which can be a little mind-numbing on account of all the blacks and cross-hatchings that happen to be what makes my pictures look distinctive - I like to have some music to bring me in the right mood. Here, again, I found that my own preferences weren’t at all suitable for inspiring anything Snape-like. Despite the host of fanfics that portray him as a very cultured and refined classical music type, I have never seen anything of the kind in him, and Debussy, Tchaikovsky or Handel weren’t (alas) going to convey any Snapey moods to me. I thought I needed something more noisy, dark, a little brutal. My problem was that I really don’t like that kind of music. I had to try and find a kind of compromise, palatable to me but still a bit louder and heavier than my usual fare. In the end, there were four CDs (and only four) that I would listen to while inking the comic. (The links go to amazon.com, because they provide samples for you to savour…)
1. Apocalyptica: Inquisition Symphony (1998). I simply adore this one. From the booklet: “This album contains excessive NOISE and EUPHONIC melodies created purely by four cellos.” I have been told that what Apocalyptica actually does is play Metallica songs on their cellos - I wouldn’t know because I don’t know Metallica at all :D. In any case, you have to hear this to believe that such wonderful instruments can churn out such horrible noises… Try number 5, “Refuse/Resist” to get an idea. For a more melodious sample, try number 4, “Nothing Else Matters”, or 8, “Fade to Black”. This album is definitely my number one “Vengeance is Bitter” soundtrack :-).
2. Garbage: Garbage (1995). As a teenager I used to hate Garbage, primarily because I found their video clips creepy and disturbing. Somehow I also remembered them as being very loud. When I went looking for my own private Snape theme music, I happened across Garbage’s nameless first album, and my curiosity was piqued by the eloquent third title, “Only Happy when it Rains”. I ended up buying the CD and finding the combination of the guitars and the twisted texts very satisfactory. From time to time I will interrupt my inking for some headbanging, or I can be found chanting sentences like “Booow down to me!” (1) or “This is not my idea of a good time!” (5), or crooning the whole of “Milk” - which would have to be Snape at a very, very soft moment ;-). If it wasn’t obvious yet, my teen hate has turned into a late twenties love…
3. Portishead: Dummy (1994). My father bought me this CD when it was brought out; he’d read a glowing review of it in the paper. When he finally heard it, he thought it was pretty horrible, but I on the other hand liked it immediately. It’s neither heavy nor loud and, I think, very feminine, but the melancholy and sweetened sarcasm of titles like “Sour Times”, “It Could Be Sweet” and “Numb” work very well for me when I am doing my black and white pictures.
4. (Various artists): Romeo + Juliet - Music from the Motion Picture. This is perhaps the least likely album on the list, but once again it is one I used to dislike on account of the noisiness of some tracks - the same noisiness that I find so inspiring for the comic. The love songs are of course the odd ones out in this context, but titles like “Local God”, “Pretty Piece of Flesh” and “Whatever” scream Young Death Eaters to me, even if they are supposed to refer to Montagues and Capulets :D.
So far for the interlude; on to page 10, finally…
17. Willow, Willow, Willow - and Snape, of course
Once again, I did everything backwards - I’m so organised! Instead of first making a thumbnail with page 10’s layout, I drew lots of little Snapes and then fit them together to tell a story. It worked, and it turned into one of my favourite pages, not least because it has the Whomping Willow in it :-).
I don’t remember exactly in what sequence everything got drawn… I think that the unfinished series of crouching Snapes above came first, but as you can tell by their state I wasn’t particularly happy with them. I don’t seem to have been in the clear as to what would go where, and it looks as if I originally planned for Snape to get at once into the tunnel - but that would have meant skipping a few essential elements, such as the way the Willow works and the fact that Snape only got inside at the hand of Sirius’s revelations. But the effort wasn’t wasted; it served as a brainstorm for the next few pages. The sketches do make it clear that at that stage I was planning to stay closer to my prose story, because I was trying to convey Snape’s sense of entrapment and claustrophobia the way I described it in The Tunnel.
What I do remember very clearly is the fun I had drawing the Snapes on the lower half of the page. It is on their basis that I drew the thumbnail, with a special effort to accommodate the jumpy Severus. As you can see, I drew him after the kneeling and prodding Severuses, and though he didn’t really have a function I was determined to keep him. In the end he was very welcome in a demonstration of the tree’s aggressive behaviour :-).
I don’t suppose you can tell by most of the comic, or my other work for that matter, but actually I do like drawing bodies in action. Only, well, because I rarely use photo reference, it can be very hard sometimes to get them right, and if they don’t look right (enough), I don’t use them. Page ten is one of my favourites because it actually does have quite a lot of action, for me at least, and the suggestion of movement of both Snape and the Willow was a challenge, and fun too.
I had to add one final Severus for the page’s first panel:
The first version seemed a little too feminine, so I opted for the second one. Here, as in the previous scrapbook page, you can see that I was already thinking about the next page. That is because it had me worried; I wasn’t too confident that I could pull off the tunnel sequence in a satisfactory way.
I didn’t sketch the Willow. I have no idea why that is. The only pencil drawing of the Whomping Willow that I could find is the one I posted previously, here, and eventually it ended up looking quite different.
For once, the Potter films made it difficult for me: I adore the way the Whomping Willow looks in Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban, but I really didn’t want to copy anything from the movie. That was hard, especially because I had always envisioned the tree as having long, liana-like, sweeping branches with which it could effectively whip, or do the sort of spectacular things that you see in the film - I wrote it like that in The Tunnel. I needed something different now. An idea came to me while I was thinking about a possible Dutch translation for “Whomping Willow”. The official translation is “Beukwilg”, which has the added pun of “beuk” meaning both “whomp” or “batter”, and “beech”. My own suggestion was “Knotswilg”, a “knots” being both a club and the sound effect of something hitting a surface, and it also hints at “knotwilg”, the Dutch word for pollard willow. Pollard willows are apparently quite typical of the low countries; they are now often being protected as an essential part of the landscape. There were plenty of them where I lived as a child, and among their distinctive features, especially when the trees were older, was a huge knot at the top (where new branches kept being topped) and their deeply grooved bark that made them relatively easy to climb. They were short and stumpy things, and oddly enough, I find that I miss them now that I live in the city. I decided to style my Whomping Willow like a tree version of a stocky bodybuilder, and it turned into a kind of multiple pollard willow with four huge knots instead of one, to be wielded like giant fists. The result is below:
sscrewdriver commented, “And, woow, is that Snape-thigh? I must say that I got to see more scrawny black and white Snape thigh in this comic than I thought you were going to flash at us. I'm still not sure if that was a good or bad thing.”
*g*
So yes, there’s definitely more Snape thigh in the pages to come, but any smut- and nekkid!Snape aficionados among my readers had better not hold their breath - they’ve seen more of Snape than I’m ever likely to show anyway ;-).
Next: Snape in the Dark.
Other exciting news is that my original four-page comic The Useless Resurrection, based on Wilde’s story of the same name, is in the pipeline for publication in the new comics magazine Het Salon. When? I dunno. Will it happen at all? I dunno either. But signs of interest always perk me up :D.
Anyway: it’s time for page ten!
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
Page Seven
Page Eight
Page Nine
You Are Here:
During a visit to the library, Sirius has made sure that Snape overheard the Marauders’ arrangements to meet by the Whomping Willow on a night with a full moon. He has also revealed the tree’s mechanism, counting on Snape’s curiosity and hatred getting the better of his common sense. And indeed, the rising full moon finds the Slytherin sneaking out of Hogwarts…
16. Mood and Music
Someone asked me a few months ago about the craziest thing I had ever done as a Snape fangirl. Now, I don’t do a lot of really crazy things, because I’m too shy and easily embarrassed and a bit closeted besides; I’d certainly never, say, dress up as a Potter character, especially not as Snape - for myself, I would find that too weird for words. But perhaps I did a much more radical thing: I entirely changed my day-to-day style.
I really am a perfectionist, and most things I do I want to do thoroughly. Oscar Wilde would say that is a typically feminine thing: I don’t have passing fancies; my love affairs are always serious and profound :D. When I am interested in something, I am deeply interested and immerse myself totally in information and atmosphere. That is an absolute requisite if I am to be productive and create something decent from my inspiration. I will read the right books, watch the right films and listen to the right music; I will visit the right places and use the right models for my pictures and prose. Chances are that I will start to dress accordingly as well. Mind you, I have never dressed like a Victorian, and I am not dressing like a witch right now; but before I got interested in Snape, I had perhaps one single black item of clothing in my wardrobe, and these days I have plenty. Just like I learned to appreciate the properties and possibilities of black in my pictures, I learned about what it could mean to my look ;-). Like my drawings, my clothes have become predominantly black, red, white and grey. My accessories, too, change with my creative phases, and I have moved from Celtic knotwork jewellery to silk neckties to black fingerless gloves.
The colour and detail was one thing, but documenting myself for a story about wizards was another. I could not do my usual historical research, as the universe I was working about is to a large extent fictional. Sadly but true, Snape doesn’t exist, so I can’t read his letters and his favourite novels, or visit his place of birth. Of course magic, whether it is real or not, and whether one believes in it or not, is a popular subject in most cultures, so there really is a lot of material to be found about it. Personally, I have always been fascinated with it, even though I do not believe in it at all. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen I was very much into tarot and incense and practical magic and read a lot about Wicca, modern druidism and the like. I also devoured a steady number of fantasy novels, preferably featuring wizards and witches. However, because Rowling’s Potterverse feels nothing like all that, this background was not of much use to me, apart from the fact that it told me what not to do. Instead, I started to read up on the Gothic subculture, which I thought extremely interesting because of its worship of black, the timeframe in which it came into existence, and its flirtation with magic and magical beings; plus, Snape has a partly Muggle background after all, so adding some Muggle subcultural elements to the mix seemed fun. I don’t think that Snape is a Goth, as I have seen people suggest here and there, but books like Nancy Kilpatrick’s The Goth Bible did help me, during the first phases of the comic, to determine the kind of atmosphere I wanted. I also gave young Snape his combat boots after reading that book, and when I picture him, I have an idea of a cross between Goth and punk at the back of my mind.
As for music, I never listen to any while writing or drawing; I find it distracting, and I need to concentrate when I am creating something. However, when I am inking - which can be a little mind-numbing on account of all the blacks and cross-hatchings that happen to be what makes my pictures look distinctive - I like to have some music to bring me in the right mood. Here, again, I found that my own preferences weren’t at all suitable for inspiring anything Snape-like. Despite the host of fanfics that portray him as a very cultured and refined classical music type, I have never seen anything of the kind in him, and Debussy, Tchaikovsky or Handel weren’t (alas) going to convey any Snapey moods to me. I thought I needed something more noisy, dark, a little brutal. My problem was that I really don’t like that kind of music. I had to try and find a kind of compromise, palatable to me but still a bit louder and heavier than my usual fare. In the end, there were four CDs (and only four) that I would listen to while inking the comic. (The links go to amazon.com, because they provide samples for you to savour…)
1. Apocalyptica: Inquisition Symphony (1998). I simply adore this one. From the booklet: “This album contains excessive NOISE and EUPHONIC melodies created purely by four cellos.” I have been told that what Apocalyptica actually does is play Metallica songs on their cellos - I wouldn’t know because I don’t know Metallica at all :D. In any case, you have to hear this to believe that such wonderful instruments can churn out such horrible noises… Try number 5, “Refuse/Resist” to get an idea. For a more melodious sample, try number 4, “Nothing Else Matters”, or 8, “Fade to Black”. This album is definitely my number one “Vengeance is Bitter” soundtrack :-).
2. Garbage: Garbage (1995). As a teenager I used to hate Garbage, primarily because I found their video clips creepy and disturbing. Somehow I also remembered them as being very loud. When I went looking for my own private Snape theme music, I happened across Garbage’s nameless first album, and my curiosity was piqued by the eloquent third title, “Only Happy when it Rains”. I ended up buying the CD and finding the combination of the guitars and the twisted texts very satisfactory. From time to time I will interrupt my inking for some headbanging, or I can be found chanting sentences like “Booow down to me!” (1) or “This is not my idea of a good time!” (5), or crooning the whole of “Milk” - which would have to be Snape at a very, very soft moment ;-). If it wasn’t obvious yet, my teen hate has turned into a late twenties love…
3. Portishead: Dummy (1994). My father bought me this CD when it was brought out; he’d read a glowing review of it in the paper. When he finally heard it, he thought it was pretty horrible, but I on the other hand liked it immediately. It’s neither heavy nor loud and, I think, very feminine, but the melancholy and sweetened sarcasm of titles like “Sour Times”, “It Could Be Sweet” and “Numb” work very well for me when I am doing my black and white pictures.
4. (Various artists): Romeo + Juliet - Music from the Motion Picture. This is perhaps the least likely album on the list, but once again it is one I used to dislike on account of the noisiness of some tracks - the same noisiness that I find so inspiring for the comic. The love songs are of course the odd ones out in this context, but titles like “Local God”, “Pretty Piece of Flesh” and “Whatever” scream Young Death Eaters to me, even if they are supposed to refer to Montagues and Capulets :D.
So far for the interlude; on to page 10, finally…
17. Willow, Willow, Willow - and Snape, of course
Once again, I did everything backwards - I’m so organised! Instead of first making a thumbnail with page 10’s layout, I drew lots of little Snapes and then fit them together to tell a story. It worked, and it turned into one of my favourite pages, not least because it has the Whomping Willow in it :-).
I don’t remember exactly in what sequence everything got drawn… I think that the unfinished series of crouching Snapes above came first, but as you can tell by their state I wasn’t particularly happy with them. I don’t seem to have been in the clear as to what would go where, and it looks as if I originally planned for Snape to get at once into the tunnel - but that would have meant skipping a few essential elements, such as the way the Willow works and the fact that Snape only got inside at the hand of Sirius’s revelations. But the effort wasn’t wasted; it served as a brainstorm for the next few pages. The sketches do make it clear that at that stage I was planning to stay closer to my prose story, because I was trying to convey Snape’s sense of entrapment and claustrophobia the way I described it in The Tunnel.
What I do remember very clearly is the fun I had drawing the Snapes on the lower half of the page. It is on their basis that I drew the thumbnail, with a special effort to accommodate the jumpy Severus. As you can see, I drew him after the kneeling and prodding Severuses, and though he didn’t really have a function I was determined to keep him. In the end he was very welcome in a demonstration of the tree’s aggressive behaviour :-).
I don’t suppose you can tell by most of the comic, or my other work for that matter, but actually I do like drawing bodies in action. Only, well, because I rarely use photo reference, it can be very hard sometimes to get them right, and if they don’t look right (enough), I don’t use them. Page ten is one of my favourites because it actually does have quite a lot of action, for me at least, and the suggestion of movement of both Snape and the Willow was a challenge, and fun too.
I had to add one final Severus for the page’s first panel:
The first version seemed a little too feminine, so I opted for the second one. Here, as in the previous scrapbook page, you can see that I was already thinking about the next page. That is because it had me worried; I wasn’t too confident that I could pull off the tunnel sequence in a satisfactory way.
I didn’t sketch the Willow. I have no idea why that is. The only pencil drawing of the Whomping Willow that I could find is the one I posted previously, here, and eventually it ended up looking quite different.
For once, the Potter films made it difficult for me: I adore the way the Whomping Willow looks in Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban, but I really didn’t want to copy anything from the movie. That was hard, especially because I had always envisioned the tree as having long, liana-like, sweeping branches with which it could effectively whip, or do the sort of spectacular things that you see in the film - I wrote it like that in The Tunnel. I needed something different now. An idea came to me while I was thinking about a possible Dutch translation for “Whomping Willow”. The official translation is “Beukwilg”, which has the added pun of “beuk” meaning both “whomp” or “batter”, and “beech”. My own suggestion was “Knotswilg”, a “knots” being both a club and the sound effect of something hitting a surface, and it also hints at “knotwilg”, the Dutch word for pollard willow. Pollard willows are apparently quite typical of the low countries; they are now often being protected as an essential part of the landscape. There were plenty of them where I lived as a child, and among their distinctive features, especially when the trees were older, was a huge knot at the top (where new branches kept being topped) and their deeply grooved bark that made them relatively easy to climb. They were short and stumpy things, and oddly enough, I find that I miss them now that I live in the city. I decided to style my Whomping Willow like a tree version of a stocky bodybuilder, and it turned into a kind of multiple pollard willow with four huge knots instead of one, to be wielded like giant fists. The result is below:
sscrewdriver commented, “And, woow, is that Snape-thigh? I must say that I got to see more scrawny black and white Snape thigh in this comic than I thought you were going to flash at us. I'm still not sure if that was a good or bad thing.”
*g*
So yes, there’s definitely more Snape thigh in the pages to come, but any smut- and nekkid!Snape aficionados among my readers had better not hold their breath - they’ve seen more of Snape than I’m ever likely to show anyway ;-).
Next: Snape in the Dark.