E.K WEAVER A graphic designer and illustrator from Austin, Texas who is currently in the middle of creating her creator owned graphic novel “The Less Than Epic Adventures Of TJ and Amal.” A story of two dudes who drive from Berkeley to Providence, take multiple detours, smoke too much weed, eat terrible Chinese food, sleep in seedy motels, get kicked out of a Goodwill, contemplate fate versus chance, piss into the sunset, start a brawl in a Waffle House, and fall in love.”
Could you talk about your process in creating your work, as well as the types of tools or media that you use?
Would you say that designing characters was just as important as the narrative of the story?
I use a combination of low-cost natural media (colored pencil, graphite pencil, typing paper, drafting pen) and digital media (WACOM tablet, Photoshop CS2). The bulk of the art is done on paper; I use Photoshop for retouching, corrections, and layout.
Not necessarily the *design* of the characters, but rendering them in a way that allows the audience to feel an emotional connection.
What part of designing/ illustrating is most fun and easy, and what is the most difficult?
What are some of your favourite designs/illustrations that you have seen? There are so many amazing artists (many my age and younger) who are continually evolving inspirations, but if we’re going with the past tense, I’d have to say Al Hirschfeld and Kyle Baker.
Most fun: initial concepts, developing a scene, writing dialogue, doing the first round of pencils. Most difficult: pushing myself to draw when tired or not feeling “connected”, letting a page go rather than tweaking it to death, technical or mechanical art like cars and buildings.
What comes first, the character design or the“style”of the project? Character building comes first for me, then the story develops alongside them. In terms of visual style, though, they’re tied so closely together that I couldn’t really say.
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I’ve always admired Hirschfeld’s knack for distilling a person’s likeness down to its essential forms – not just facial resemblance but style of motion and posture as well. He depicts someone’s essence clearly even while rendering it in impossible ways – placing the eyes below the mouth, say, or drawing tight spirals for eyes. Not only that, but watching the documentary The Line King and seeing how instead of just flinging out these effortless curves and perfectly placed lines (as I’d previously thought), that he took each drawing through a painstaking sketching and refining process… it was like a beam of light out of the blue. I saw that pouring effort and time into artwork showed dedication, not inability to “get it right the first time”. That artists aren’t gods but people who work really damn hard.