Exercise: Drawing a Grid

Brief

To draw up and divide an A3 piece of card/paper into an 8-grid page.

The grid

Research

I wanted to do a little bit of research on why we use grids/panels and how we can manipulate panels to benefit our story.

The short of it is we use grids to help pace the story, but there are different ways we can pace that story and all that depends on the layout of the grids. There's two types of panelling, columns and rows. 1

An example of a comic stylised and read in rows.

2 Watchmen (1/12) Influx January 28, 2019

An example of a comic stylised and read in columns.

3 Legion of Super Heroes 2011 Issue 11, Sept. 2012.

What the objective is of having different styles of layouts and pacings is to create the mood intended for that scene-- or the style of the comic. Panel sizes depends on the importance of a scene and the space around the panel (i.e the gutter), will vary in space between the next panel depending on how they relate to the next panel with the narration. 4

Evaluation

For this short exercise it's an insight to how different layouts and coloumns impact styles and narrations; I really like the coloumn method but that will be something to explore more in the future.

1 C. Gavaler, The Patron Saint of Superheroes, 7 Dec. 2015 https://thepatronsaintofsuperheroes.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/analyzing-comics-101-layout/ Accessed 23 June 2022.

2 Influx, Telegraph 'Watchmen (1/12), 28 Jan. 2019 https://telegra.ph/WATCHMEN112-01-28 Accessed 23 June 2022.

3 View Comic.Com, Legion of Super Heroes 2011 Issue 11, Sept. 2012. https://view-comic.com/legion-of-super-heroes-2011-issue-11/ Accessed 23 June 2022.

4 Comic Book Artist, Creative ComicArt 'Comic Panels and Comic Layout', U/A. https://www.creativecomicart.com/comic-panels--layout.html Accessed 23 June 2022.