Task 1: What's Your Biggest Problem
The task was to draw a random character name form a hat and then write down their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The character I got was a Wonder Women that I knew few things about, and I had to look up some facts about her.
Next, we had to read out all the categories and make people guess the character. At least two people in our class knew straight away who the character is.
I learnt that all the characters have unique traits that make them recognizable, and it is something I should apply to my character design. Usually, I try to give my characters unique personality that fits their role in the story, but developing my character further in terms of weaknesses, opportunities and threats would make them more unique and that’s something I would like to try.
Task 2: Emulation Task
1.The person / people who I’d like to emulate in my career are:
The person who inspired me to pursue comic artist career is a Canadian comic book artist Fiona Staples. I always admired her for her clean line work as well as colouring in one of my favourite ongoing series Saga illustrated by Fiona.
2.Why do you want to emulate them?
Saga is an amazing and very long comic book series that shows characters growth, and the style reminds very consistent. Creating a long series and keeping a consisted art style is something I would like to achieve and be recognised for as an artist in the future.
3. What is their position within the contemporary industry?
Fiona is an experienced comic book artist who won multiply awards for her skills in visual story telling as well as the unique way she portrays the characters in the stories.
4. What path did they take? How long did it take for them to get where they are?
Fiona started her career by taking a part in a challenge called 24-hour comic and working with writers to slowly become more popular over time and work on bigger projects. She also has been actively posting on social media since 2012 from what I know, but it may be way earlier on different platforms. She published her first anthology from 24-hour comic challenge in 2005 and a year later she had her first comic series assigned and worked with a writer Andrew Foley for Markosia graphic novel publishing company.
5. How do they promote themselves?
She actively keeps her audience updated on every comic series she works on through social media platforms such as Facebook, tweeter, Instagram and Tumblr. Her social media accounts also act as portfolio of her work.
Example:
https://fionastaples.tumblr.com/
6. What do you need to do, to get you to where they are?
I need more courage to post my work online. At the moment, I am very cautious of what I post on social media, especially the illustrated stories. Although I know that I need to show them to the public, I feel like this is not yet the style of work I would like to present to my audience. If my social media were to act as my portfolio, I don’t want to just post any work, I need the best pieces to be out there.
I also think I need to start doing something else than positing random pieces of work, for example small challenges like drawing popular characters in my style since popular industries like Marvel or DC often want to see how artist draw their characters. It would also help me to gain more followers and build my social media accounts.
Another thing I want to try is creating a content that may fit into categories of comic book publishing for example Image comic are well known for looking for new talented artist with various art styles and are interested in story genres such as fantasy, science fiction and more. In my previous year I took a part in creating a science fantasy anthology as a part of a group project, which went incredibly well. I would like to continue working on these types of stories, which is why this year I chose to work on creating fantasy stories. I think it is a good way to practice and a chance to get feedback from experienced industry professionals that can provide me with some guidance.
Task 3: Long term goals
1. Investing in a first property
My first long term goal in getting a mortgage in UK. When I moved here in 2015, I wasn’t sure where I want to live, but after many years I meet amazing people, build connections and almost got a degree, which makes me want to stay here and continue what I started and continue living in UK.
As a part of making living here permanent, I would like to have my own safe space, ideally a detached house. It would give me room to grow, for example I could create my own office and work from home without worrying that what I have at the moment is temporary and I will have to move houses over and over again. In the past 8 years I have moved houses over 12 times and there are plans in place to do it at least 3 more times at the moment. However, each time it takes a lot of my time, energy and funds to do so. As a result, instead of investing time and money in new art equipment and creating new things, I spend most of these on moving from one place to another.
I was planning to start executing this plan right after university. The first step would be getting a job and saving money for the deposit. Putting away some percentage of my pay is natural for me at this stage of my life and I’m having no problems with planning my spending each month. I have not yet planned as to how much am I planning to save each year as I want to first get a job to plan around how much I make.
Next, step would be to pay any of my contracts off whenever is a phone or some subscriptions, these will need to be cut down according to mortgage advisors.
Another thing is to rent a property and pay bills somewhere at least for a year to qualify for first time buyer skim to get a discount for the mortgage. Although I’ve been renting places on my own before, it is better to do that again right before getting a mortgage to provide the proof of me being financially responsible with a closer to date documents.
The last part of it is having a clean credit score. At the moment my credit score looks good and have very little history. However, I will need to work on building it up to look as best as possible because any additional loans and funds will be needed for buying, furnishing and renovating a new property.
These are all the preparation for my first goal so far that I will be working on right after finishing university.
2. Build audience through social media.
I consider building an audience on social media a long-term goal as it may take few years to get thousands of followers, which only a hundred of them may be true fans that will stay constantly engaged with my work and buy my products. Since, I starter attending university I found a very little time to create content for social media and post it. However, I am planning to make a come back and start posting at least weekly again. This time I am going to do something more than just posting pictures, I always wated to try recording short videos and engage more with my audience through taking on various art challenges. Once, I have enough followers I would like to also create my own draw in your style challenges for my audience to take a part in and try drawing characters I designed.
I believe this will benefit me in a long run as some events such as comic cons have requirements to meet in terms of audience when it comes to booking a table.
3. Write books
I saw many artist publishing books about how they started working in art industry and what their processes look like. That’s once type of the books I would like to create on a side form my comic book artist career. Another type would be art books. It would be books with my vip art, extra content, and pieces to give a go and colour by my audience. That’s something I have yet to think about.
I could invest into printing these myself and sell them online, preferably at my own online store. It would require a lot of content that I could work on slowly over the years while building online presence and working on my career.
4. Open online shop
At some point I would like to sell my artwork such as, prints, badges, any merch and more online. I heard that small artist starts with Etsy or other places. However, there are many negative sides to it as of lately in terms of service, so I started considering creating my own site. This will take lots of preparations and funds, but I think it will be doable in a long run. There are websites like Wix that let you create an online shop and sell, but I have yet to look into creating one of these.
Task 4: Short Term Goals
1. Work on my art style
This is something I have been working on for a while and getting very close to achieving it. For some time, I have been looking into other artists and their style and processes. I practiced and tried many new things, but I still need to work on that in terms of getting my style to be consistent throughout my illustrated stories and drawing some of the small details like face features of the characters the way I want them to look like. I still want to go through few art books and tutorials about things like backgrounds and perspective I would like to purchase and learn from it, as I found it is the most effective for me to sit down and practice with a book that I can always go through again if I feel like I need to. I am currently going through "Beginner’s Guide to Digital Painting" book as I often find it hard to work in digital software and I need step by step guide to learn and practice new techniques.
Books I am planning to read soon:
Task 5: Question Sheet
We were asked to complete a few questions about what we aim to do in the future career wise.
Here are my completed questions:
1.Please provide a brief outline of your preferred goal.
My main goal is to become a sequential artist and work on bigger projects such as a longer illustrated series in the form of a comic, graphic novel or webtoon.
2. What support do you specifically need to help you to achieve this goal?
Point me into right direction such as with people to talk to. I’m not sure where to start and what would have the best results in the end.
3.Please provide a brief outline of your planned Cartoon Museum idea.
Kinga is very well known in Poland because of YouTube for her constructive critique and motivating artists to learn all the basics and use this knowledge. She was my greatest inspiration and motivation to become an artist. I was thinking of creating a 2-page comic showing a day of an artist giving some kind of motivational speech about their career. Throughout this project this idea may be slightly altered depending on what artist I am going to be able to get in touch with, but the content would be similar.
Task 6: Mock Jobs
The task was to pick one of the mock jobs and apply for it. I picked Internship for Inker as it was the closest to what I want to do in the future. I attach a description of the mock job below.
As a part of the application, we were tasked with creating a professional email that would serve as a cover letter. I used university website that provided me various examples of how each part of a cover letter should look like.
Here is my finished cover email:
Title of email: 3-month internship inker-Agata Przybyla
Dear Gareth Cowlin
I am writing regarding the 3-month Internship for an inker that has been advertised. As an up-and-coming comic artist, it would be a great opportunity to broaden my horizons about creating graphic novels.
I have previously worked on an anthology with other artists that was marketed at MCM London Comic Con. Therefore, I have experience of making comics as well as teamwork, excellent communication, and marketing skills. In addition to my vendor experience I am also knowledgeable in both traditional and digital inking, scriptwriting, working in various styles and genres of graphic novels. I believe this will make me the perfect candidate for this role.
Please find attached my CV and portfolio linked below for more information on my background and qualifications. Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely Agata Przybyla
Portfolio link: https://www.artstation.com/agata_przybyla_art
To create a portfolio, I created account on Art Station and LinkedIn. I also attached my pre-existing Instagram account with my artwork as it was advised by one of the artist we had a talk with.
I uploaded my most recent art works, few pages of the comic anthology form MCM London Comic Con project and character design. I also added some uncolored version of my work to show my inking.
I think at the moment my portfolio couldn’t look any better, I added everything I had that could be relevant to the inker job. However, in the future I am planning to create more work that would be more suitable for a portfolio.
Example from the website:
Cv that I have attached to the cover email:
