Exercise: Filling a Grid

Brief

In the first panel draw a picture of a place you know well and want to visually document. It could be your workplace, or a friend’s house, local shop, church or nearby park. Now visualize the place in your mind and begin to walk round it in your head. Make a series of pencil drawings of your memories of the place.

Try to include as much detail as you can remember. It’s not important that the drawings are technically perfect, but try to include as much information as you can recall. If the building is a school, for example, the first panel will be a drawing of the school. Now can you visualize where the assembly hall is, where the dinner hall or classrooms are.

Draw these spaces as well as you can from memory. Are there chairs outside the classroom doors, or hooks with coats hanging on them? Are there signs on the walls, and are the floors carpeted or tiled? It is almost like creating a computer game in your mind, except you are using your memory as much as you possibly can.

You could also write sounds or snatches of dialogue you might hear as you move around the space. Do birds ‘cheep’, or can you hear voices from a distant classroom? How would you represent these sounds or speech? If you find you cannot describe the whole place in one page, you can continue onto another 8-panel page, but keep the exercise to 2 pages maximum.

My piece and explanation

I imagined where I work, a superstore. and I started off even before I enter the workplace (starting with the outside). Then I started to walk through the entrance of the shop, to the staff entrance- through the corridor, up the stairs and into the canteen. Making my way through the changing room to the bathroom- with an extra room being the cabinet where we have all our electronics and point-of-sale signs.

I tried my best to really push my skills in using perspective in most of them, I really wanted to capture what you would see walking throughout the store; I added a few action sounds, like the annoying drip of a tap, and the staff entrance door beeping as you open it.

Evaluation

This exercise was really fun to do, it allowed me to trial out perspective and testing my references from memory. It's a could learning step to what skills I could develop in the future, like creating backgrounds for comics that hold a narrative and it could also help me figure out what panelling and grid methods would best suit different scenes.

I feel like I was successful in some panels with perspective and detailing but I found other more difficult as I couldn't remember them as easily. However, it is just from memory.