February 1st was a fun day of creating for the NASH Illustrators! Our first attempt at creating comics on the hour at every hour of the day is quite a challenge. Tina Ritchie, The Illustrious Sanguine, and Jeremy Sosnick all contributed to the quest for comic book production at record speed! Here are their reflections on the event:
Tina Ritchie
“This year’s hourly comic day was non-negotiable for multiple reasons, the most significant being that I know how beneficial it is for growth and confidence in my skill set. The last time I participated in this challenge was two years ago, and there were some beautiful stories that came out of it. I skipped last year, and regretted doing so—after all, it’s only one day out of a whole year. Making time for it is much easier than I might convince myself!
My takeaways from this year’s challenge were that I have grown a LOT as a comic artist, and have grown accustomed to taking more time on my comics. Two years ago, I felt much more able to rush through a two-page sequence and finish it within the hour limit. This year, I took more care to let each comic be its best—which meant most of them taking longer than one, or even two hours to make.
Overall, I am happy with how each story came through and loved the process of creating so many in one day. It’s satisfying to finally tell stories that have been lodged in my head for a long while, and I look forward to sharing them in our first ever Nash illustrators anthology!”
-Tina
The Illustrious Sanguine
“For Hourly Comics Day, I drew a comic strip every hour set in the same world as my long-form comic ELDERNET, intending each to be a short vignette of life in the cyberweird, requiring no context or knowledge of the other strips in the series, or of ELDERNET itself. Yet, as I planned and executed the series, I immediately started picking up on common threads and themes: apophenia and conspiracies, temporal phenomenology, and the limitations of human perception.”
-The Illustrious Sanguine
Jeremy Sosnick
“I ended up spending a lot more than one hour on each of the 6 pages of my comic book focused on the online dating world. I found that sketching each of the pages, cleaning them up in Photoshop, and then wordsmithing the copy was easily filling up the time. I’m used to working at a slower pace so this was a good kick in the pants to really focus in on how to be a bit more efficient in my process. I’m happy with this attempt at Hourly Comics and will probably try it differently next year.”
-Jeremy
Thanks for joining us and be on the lookout for our anthology of work from this event! #hourlycomicday