Documenting a Hand Drawn Comic
I was able to get this awesome chance to pair with my friend Anna again of her making a video and me taking photos of creator and owner Kelly of Jetlagged Comics. These environmental portraits are so much fun to do, it probably helped that with both of these sessions I've done there has been three of us pretty much having fun, playing around and watching an awesome woman create things for her own business. Once we got to Kelly's house, we chitchatted for a little bit then assessed her office work space. I had done a little homework before I got to her house, I had watched a 4 part mini series on YouTube about how Jetlagged Comics came to be. You can see it here. That series was all about how the comics came to be but not the actual art process. My friend Anna, making the video wanted to share the actually artistic process and I photographed that process as well and you can watch the video and story she made here.
Kelly's space is wonderful, right when you walk in you see a huge piece of artwork featuring her main character of her comic series Bev and then names of all of her Patreon donations. She currently ships out all her own orders when they get placed, yes she is a one woman show doing it all, the art, taking ordering and sending out orders from her home. WOW!
After we got a few shots of the space and her idea notebook, she got to work starting to draw the comic. In general it was just fun to watch the whole process from beginning to end. Starting first with pencil, getting the sketching down and then moving to a fine tip Copic marker and doing the outline of the comic.
She created a story with her video of the process and added this fun little drama of Kelly trying to figure out what to put in the text bubble. While it was fun for the video, it wasn't what I needed to photograph for my lifestyle personal branding photo session of her. Instead I just did a simple photo of her in her work chair writing in her notebook.
Of course since we were doing this tandem session I did get a few photos of Anna taking video of Kelly. She also did get a photo of me taking photos. Kelly then finished up the paper and pen part of the art. Adding the text, boarder and signature to the comic. She then took a scan of it and put it on her computer to finish the final part of coloring in.
For the final part of the comic part she was at her computer, which I took the chance to get some fun different angles of her space. I wanted to include her stack of stock books along with her file cabinet of original artworks for the comics.
To finish off everything I did have to take some posed personal branding and environmental photos of Kelly. I wanted one of her smiling at her desk mid art work and also away from her desk in her living room doing a simple pose. Both copies of her books are on the coffee table right next to her.
This was a wonderful session to photograph and watch being recorded. Anna and I are still planning to do more of these tandem sessions and I've found a love for doing personal branding sessions. I will be looking to do more of them.
