A variation of the diary

 


I like keeping things fresh. So here is a slightly different variation I've tried out for myself. I used slightly different prompts. (It's fun to invent new ones along the way.) Here is what I used:
1. One thing I noticed.
2. I thing I started liking.
3. One thing I've been working on.
4. One thing I do almost every day.
5. One thing I want to learn.
6. One conversation I had.

In this one, I've done it very loosely. (And slightly messy. As I was mainly concerning about recording my thoughts and not so much trying to make it look polished enough to show the world. I don't show all my personal diaries, especially if they are too personal.) This time, I drew it with a pen but coloured it digitally.

To match the extreme casual looseness of the lines, I made the flat digital colouring equally loose. I used a mouse so I'd have less control, and I just lasso and filled up areas I wanted to colour. In my mind, I treated the colouring as cutting and pasting transparent sheets of coloured paper over the lines. And I kept it to only 2 colours. And I also observed the basic tonal contrast principles to make important parts of the pictures stand out.



Comments

MiataGrrl said…
Very nice loose look, not messy. I, too, have personal comics that I don't share, and I'm in the habit of having only myself as audience (like a written diary), which is why some comics I share probably leave questions for the reader. You mentioned that in your feedback to me...that one of the panels leaves the reader wondering why I was doing something. So that's an interesting broader question about the diary comics genre: If we choose to go public with something we think of as a diary, do we owe the reader an explanation? Or does the reader accept that they may not be able to understand everything that is going on? Hmmm...! (I enjoy thinking about things like this! 😃)
Andrew Tan said…
Ooh I love thoughts like that. Diary comics are a genre? Maybe it might be. Many people do them in different ways. I don't think we owe the reader any explanation, if it was done purely for ourselves. But for me, I see that diaries are for myself and also for my wife, kids, and people I want to share my experiences with. It's to pass down information and little lessons I've learned about life. Also to remind myself what I've learned at this point in time. So I do try to put in enough clues so that it's intuitive for the reader (who could be my kids) to understand what's going on. If it's too ambiguous or confusing, I myself might not understand it years later.

Still, I am selective on what I want to put down. One good selection criteria for me is - put down something valuable/useful for myself or others to read in the future.

But if that info is way too personal, maybe hiding it in some poetic form could work. Haha. That's when it can be a little ambiguous and people would have to work harder to figure it out.

What do you think?