Category: Art

The Rooster – by Omar Musa

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Hi everyone! It’s been a while I’ve posted, but the good news is that Reuters wrote an article on me and my (feminist) comics on historical queens. It was a good interview too, with many thanks to Michael Taylor. It’s super-gratifying to have my work acknowledged.

The Rooster

This is a poem by Indonesian poet Omar Musa, which I was asked to adapt into comics form by the Cordite Poetry review from a while ago. Here it is, finally, in its full form.

The Adaptation Process

Omar Musa’s poem “The Rooster” is an exploration of masculinity, mostly about the difference between a man’s perception of himself, and of the man’s actual reality. For that reason, I’ve divided the poem into 2 ‘columns’, the left showing the man/rooster as he actually is, and the right hand side showing the man/rooster as how he sees himself.

There are, however, two things that occupy the entire width of the page – neutral scenes of nature, and the parang, which is a reference to death. Since death and nature takes everybody in the end, these things straddle both columns.

A rooster is a common, traditional representation of manhood, so when the rooster (as a symbol) is ultimately killed and discovered to be simple-minded and hollow, the meaning of the poem is quite clear. In a way, I saw the poem as about the de-throning of masculinity. So on the left-hand side, the rooster is depicted as old and mangy, where as in the right-hand side, the rooster clearly sees itself as strong and powerful.

The same applies to the depiction of the man (the narrator) in the story. Since this is an Australian poem, I wanted to work some themes of migrants and displacement into it. On the right-hand side, the image of the man is that of a white, patriarchal kind of figure, meant to represent the “Aussie battler”, which is still a very common depiction of a “typical, Australian male”. On the left hand side is an older, non-white man, which I think is a better representation of the changing face of Australia. However, despite Australia’s racial melting-pot, people still tend to see the “quintessential” Australian male as a “white, blue-collar, fair-dinkum” sort of bloke, which I think is a stereotype that at least needs to be changed, if not torn down.

Last of all, is the ‘blood on the cuffs’ at the end. This as represents a ‘lingering remnant of violence’, which I interprete as a man’s need to defend his idea of himself against those who would attack that idea. A lot of male-on-male violence happens because someone is questioning a man about his ‘manhood’, so I drew blood-trails from the cuffs back to the rooster to the right-hand side of the page. The blood is only red when it’s on the cuffs, because the threat of violence only becomes real when you do violence in real life.

ABC Featured Story: Drawing Manga in Australia

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Hi all! A few months ago, I was asked to do a strip by ABC Radio National (Earshot) about my experiences working as a manga artist in Australia. It was part of a larger investigation into manga by ABC RN, and I was happy to do it.

You can listen to the radio program here at the ABC website, where it’s part of Earshot, which went live on Monday the 8th Oct 2018. I also did a short live radio segment on Stop Everything on Friday the 12th Oct 2018, which was lotsa fun.

The comic itself is available below, and it was so unexpectedly popular it got on the front page of the ABC website!

CLICK HERE TO READ THE STORY!

I got so pumped about it being on the front page of the ABC website, that I took a screenshot. It’s kind of vain, but it won’t last for long, so I might as well revel in it for a little while!

Fantasy World Building: Creating Backgrounds for your Story

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This is a workshop I gave for the Sydney Comics Guild in February 2017, and I finally am putting it online. Before I go into the meaty bits, I have to clarify what this workshop covers and doesn’t cover:

  • This post is not intended to teach you how to draw backgrounds. The basics of background drawing are widely available online, and mastering it simply requires practice.
  • Instead, it aims to teach you some basic ideas of how to create architectural structures or clothing that are distinct from one another. In other worlds, world-building basics is one of its goals.

What is World-Building?

World-building is the process of constructing a reasonably believable fictional place or universe. This most commonly happens in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, but the truth is, creating a reasonably believable time and place is necessary for any kind of fiction.

The goal here is not to draw something generic-looking, but something specific-looking. Drawing generic-looking backgrounds is a basic skill in comics, but drawing something specific-looking requires vision and a unique visual style that could be attributed, at a glance, to a particular writer/artist or a particular story.

Case in point, my work for “The Dreaming” series:

“The Dreaming” is a 3-book series I did in 2004-2007. It’s a horror story set in our world, and located entirely within a Victorian-era inspired school, with lots of dark wood panels, cluttered wallpaper, etc. As such, It’s a specific location created for this story, and I haven’t created a location that looks like this in any of my works since.

Readers remember this series mostly for how the school looks, and this is what you want to aim for when you create the visual design of a world. In this case, it’s not to draw a generic school, but a specific one that becomes a character within the story as well.

A second example is my other series “Fabled Kingdom” (see picture below). As you can see, this looks very different to “The Dreaming”, not just in what is being depicted, but also in the toning style of the series. “Fabled Kingdom” is a fairytale adventure world VS the gothic ghost story undertones of “The Dreaming“, and thus uses tones that are a lot less dark, and a more whimsical architecture style with less straight lines.

Tips for Creating Fantasy Castles/Cities

Here are some more scenes from “Fabled Kingdom”. When creating a fantasy location like a castle or a city, it’s a good idea to consider things like landscapes and mountains. That’s because to sustain life, you must have water, and also if you have plumbing, the slope of the land matters.

This seems like a minor issue that few people consider, but unlike the outlandishly fantastical lands depicted in fantasy/sci-fi posters or book covers, a comic book artist must create spaces that are 3-dimensional and lived in. This is because you have to visually depict your characters moving in and interacting with that space at all times, so it’s best to always think of space in a 3-dimensional way when creating any buildings. It may be difficult to do at first, but it will become easier as you change the way you think. For this same reason, the layout of the building also has to make sense.

To expand the scope a bit more, when creating the a castle or city, it’s a good idea to consider the skyline. Skylines that are striking can help differentiate different cities/castles from one another – for example, the skyline of Castle Roserock (see above) is one rectangle with five spires, with the middle one being the highest. You can integrate the history of the world and building into the skyline and floorplan of your buildings, which can be inspiring for writer-artists.

Tips for Fantasy Civilisations

Creating distinctive and different-looking fantasy civilisations is always hard, since it’s common for creators to just stick to one style of architecture and only modify it slightly. This is lazy, but if it’s not well-thought out before one start creating, it’s easy to paint yourself into a corner because you’ve exhausted all your ideas for just the one civilisation and now can’t find the inspiration to do another, constrasting civilisation. One way to avoid this is to plan ahead, and conceive of each civilisation as collection of polygonal shapes. You can also use real life or history for inspiration.

You can see this in the examples above: Summerstone is inspired by Ancient Eygpt, and so uses a lot of trapeziums, triangles, and circles. Meanwhile, Fallinor (the western-style fantasy castle) uses mostly rectangles, triangles, and ovals. Motifs are also important, and a good way to differentiate between different civilisations. For example, being sun worshippers, there are sun motifs everywhere in Summerstone, including on the clothing of its people, whereas Fallinor has more flower/tree motifs.

One Piece: Using Shapes to World-Build

The popular manga “One Piece” is an example of utilising the “shapes” idea in its skylines. You can see here, that while the composition is similar in each of the two sets of skylines, the shapes used makes each location immediately and recognisably different. Once you’ve nailed the shapes, the small details can be fine-tuned to enhance differences.

I should also note that “One Piece” uses a lot of real-life civilisations for inspiration as well, which is a great help, and good fun for the readers. Even when they don’t use real-life inspiration, the shapes used in all the background designs are distinct, and therefore strong and memorable. “One Piece’s” unique art style makes everything look even more distinctive.

Final Things to Consider in World Building

  • Terrain: is your country mountainous or mostly flat? Inland or by the sea? Swamps, marshes, deserts, rolling hills, forests, jungles, plains, rivers, valleys, lakes, and natural resources such as animals and minerals. All these things are important.
  • What is the climate like? This affects your characters’ clothing style, and it also affects architecture. If your place has heavy snow or rain in Winter, then no one will ever build anything with a flat roof. If a place is very hot and has high humidity, the houses won’t be fully enclosed as to ensure the circulation of fresh air. If a place is prone to floods, then houses may be built on stilts. Tornados? Underground or in the rockface, etc
  • If you build a city, it has to be close to a water source. However, not everything needs to have rivers and lakes – there are plenty of places that have underground water. People can build irrigation channels from underground water sources.
  • Mythology, History and Religion can be a big influence on motifs and how a civilisation looks. Where do your people come from? Where do they think they come from? What is their history? Were they originally farmers, nomads, or did they sail to where they are now? Have they been enslaved before by a greater power? Are they themselves conquerors and slavers? Have any great cataclysms happened to them in the past that influenced them? And so on.

Thanks for reading this! Also, have fun! Study the history, politics, mythologies, religion, philosophies, biology, medicine and economics, etc of our world in order to come up with something believable!

Hatshepsut – Holy Sites – SOURCES

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The most important religious site of Hatshepsut’s day was probably Amun’s Temple of Karnak in Thebes, which was the centre of the cult of Amun that Hatshepsut was head priestess (God’s wife) of. Karnak was the centre of many large-scale building projects by many pharaohs, including the famous obelisks that Hatshepsut was known for raising, one of which still stands today. Luckily for us, Karnak has been reconstructed by digital means via the Digital Karnak project, so it’s fairly easy to get a good grasp of who build what and when.

  • We actually don’t really know what was painted on much of Karnak’s walls, but it’s safe to assume that it was mostly of Egyptian gods and other such inscriptions. Parts of Karnak was always being demolished and rebuilt by successive pharaohs, so even the ruins of Karnak nowadays don’t necessarily much resemble what they looked like in Hatshepsut’s time.
  • The panel in the top right hand corner depicts the purification baths Hatshepsut would have bathed in before she conducted her duties as God’s Wife of Amun. Unfortunately, they were based off roman-era (Ptolemic) baths that were built near Karnak some centuries later, recently discovered, meaning that Hatshepsut’s baths probably didn’t look like that. However, they were the only source material I could find of what the baths may have looked like.

A computer-generated model of what Karnak might have looked like in Hatshepsut’s time. This is BEFORE she had built her first pair of obelisks. SOURCE: Digital Karnak

Roman-era baths uncovered near the temple of Luxor. SOURCE: World Archaeology

These are the first pair of obelisks Hatshepsut raised, which was commissioned during the reign of Thutmose II and located near the front gate of Karnak. Her obelisks were gold-plated and full of inscriptions, and you may notice a smaller, shorter pair of obelisks behind them. Those pair of obelisks were raised by her father Thutmose I, and while they were probably gold too, I decided to make their colour duller because otherwise there would appear to be four obelisks when the text clearly states there were two. Either way, there are still four obelisks in the picture; just understand that Hatshepsut raised the taller ones only. One of her obelisks still stands today.

A clearer look at the front gate of Karnak, showing the twin obelisks of Thutmose I, but not those raised by Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut would raise her larger ones in front of her father’s. SOURCE: Digital Karnak

Hatshepsut built an untold number of temples to Egyptian gods and goddesses, and a few of them remain today in all their (faded) glory. She was one of the first pharaohs to build extensively in stone, which meant her buildings lasted a lot longer than those that came before her.

  • Top left panel:  Depicts a temple she dedicated to the lioness-headed goddess of war Pakhet, which the Greeks equated to their goddess of the hunt Artemis. It’s referred to nowadays by it’s Greek name Speos Artemeidos. Once again, I imagined it as brightly-painted in its heyday.
  • Top middle panel:  The red chapel, made of red granite, would have been a beautiful building had it been left standing. Sadly, it seemed that Hatshepsut never got got finish building it and Thutmose III possibly had to finish it for her, since the top level inscriptions were all inscribed with Thutmose III’s name. He later dismantled it completely to make way for his other building projects. It was originally built as a barque shrine, which is waystation for a god to rest in when his/her statue is being carried around on a barque, a ceremonial boat that the god “travels” in.
  • Top right panel:  Hatshepsut commissioned a number of sphinxes in her time, many as statues lining the way to Karnak’s entrances. Thutmose III would replace them with his own sphinxes, but you can still see some of Hatshepsut’s more feminine-looking sphinxes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many people aren’t aware that sphinxes were brightly-painted in their time as well.
  • Bottom panel:  Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple of Djeser-Djeseru (‘Holiest of Holies), which is not her tomb, as it is dedicated to Amun. Her funerary cult didn’t last long after her death, but the temple was being used by various other religious cults for centuries after, until it became unsafe. The most important thing about this rendition of Djeser-Djeseru is that it includes another mortuary temple to its left, the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep II. This means that the structure you see with the pyramid is actually not part of Djeser-Djeseru, but it was already there when Djeser-Djeseru was built right next to it. Mentuhotep II’s temple didn’t survive the ages, which is why the real image of Djeser-Djsesru below doesn’t have it. A third temple to Amun was built by Thutmose III between and to the back of these two temples, but it also didn’t survive. Obviously, since the Thutsmose III-built structure didn’t exist during Hatshepsut’s lifetime it’s not depicted here.

This temple dedicated to Pakhet, the lioness-headed goddess of war was also called Speos Artemidos (Grotto of Artemis) by the Greeks. SOURCE: Wikipedia

Hatshepsut’s most famous building, her mortuary temple of Djeser-Djeseru, which still stands today. SOURCE: Wikipedia

 

A rendition of Amun’s barque being carried by his priests. There weren’t many opportunities for the gods’ barques to make an appearance in this story, but nearly all gods had barques and followers who carried them around before the public in festivals.

This is a relief from the Red Chapel of Amun’s barque being carried by his priests. The figurehead of the barque (on both prow and stern) are ram’s heads because they’re sacred to Amun.

Visual Sources