Illuminating letters: craft club

Dear reader,

It’s craft club time again and this month I wanted to really embrace constraints this time around.

I really enjoyed our first exercise where a lot of the decisions were taken out of my hands. Dividing a story across a grid with just a few words in each frame and a challenge to fill at least half the frames with only images, ideally abstract ones, got me thinking about how I work differently.

So I thought what if instead of spreading the text out and then filling in images the image types were the constraints? If there was some force, fate, chance, that decided if I drew a close-up, or a frame with dialogue, or did something abstract, then I had to fit a story to that pattern?

The first step was making something that would make some decisions for me. So I made this spinner with prompts for different focuses of frames1. It’s just a few pieces of coloured paper and a card backing with a push pin to enable spinning. I’ve made a digital version if you’d like to have a go for yourself, but I highly recommend getting crafty.

Then I made a list of all the things I typically do on a morning, on tiny pieces of paper I could move around, alongside a simple comic grid. I was betting on the idea that a morning routine was a simple narrative I could contort into different images as decided by chance.

Then I hit spin to see how I would bring it to life.

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I added the form prompts into the frame first, then worked out how I could put my morning activities into those forms in a way that would make sense. It definitely felt like I was doing things backwards and I had to leave a few activities out along the way. But I made something that made sense.

Then all I had to do was get drawing.

This is how the final comic came together. I think it is a pretty accurate picture of my morning, minus a few snoozes.

It was a fun challenge to have so much pre-decided (not quite as much as spinning the spinner though!). I wouldn’t have added in as many sound effects without the spinner and they’re some of my favourite parts, alongside the teeth-brushing details.

I can see myself coming back to the spinner in moments where I’m stuck. But I was sad that I never landed on “slow down” and there’s not as much pacing in this as I’d like. So I’m ready to get back to making more choices based on storytelling rather than chance.

That’s all for now!

Write / draw again soon,

Natalie