INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST JESS SMART SMILEY
From today’s interview with Gavin’s Underground for City Weekly:
“Gavin: What’s the process for you when creating a new comic, from first idea to final product?
Jess: One fun way to start is to put three characters you’ve made together, and start an idea map (or idea web) and jot down little ideas about each character. What they like to eat, what they do all day, their interests and desires, what they hate and where they live. Things like that. Just have fun thinking about it, and see where the ideas go. The important thing is to let the ideas run themselves–don’t impose any story or moral on them, just put them in a room together and listen to them talk.”
You see how verbose I am? Sheesh. Read the full interview here.
You write in a similar way I do – the character definitely decides its own journey & fate. I start with a character in a situation, & the character lets me know how s/he got into that position, & what s/he wants to do about it. It’s like I’m an observer, but one with the godlike power to reboot a scene if it leads nowhere.
There’s this really great quote from Cy Twombly that I love. He’s talking about painting, but it’s the same thing, I think, with writing.
He says “”It’s instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it’s like coming through the nervous system. It’s like a nervous system. It’s not described, it’s happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning. It’s like I’m experiencing something frightening, I’m experiencing the thing and I have to be at that state because I’m also going.”