Drawing and Speculation

Background research

Franklin Christenson Ware, also known as Chris Ware, is an American cartoonist who was known for his works: Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Building Stories and Rusty Brown. For this project, I will be focusing specifically on Building Stories and the way it conveys the mix of histories on a block of the city to create a inspirational illustration.

Just like the title, Building Stories features the stories of the characters that resides in a 98-year-old building in Chicago. The main protagonist is an unnamed florist with a prosthetic leg, whose story involves emotions such as loneliness and tiny moments of happiness. Other characters involved in Building Stories l includes a couple with a broken relationship, the landlady and a bee who lives near the building. The character's stories are communicated through comic panels that were printed on a series of books, pamphlets and broadsheets, which could be read in any particular order.

Unlike stories that are constituted of interesting and breathtaking plots, Chris Ware focuses on creating stories that shows the mundane and everyday events the character face, as he said in an interview, "regular human life is already so extra strange, moving and complicated. I’m more than happy not plugging it into any amplification." (Ware, 2019). A reviewer also pointed out that the purpose of the building is to frame the lives and stories of the protagonist, which also resembles the ordinary fact that everyone lives in a building (Leith, 2012). Moreover, despite the lack of dialogues and realism in Chris Ware's style of illustration, a documentary realism was still achieved as he successfully captured the actions, emotions and events of the characters in a unexaggerated and realistic manner (Leith, 2012).

Visual analysis on Chris Ware's Building Stories

Drafts and initial drawings of the building

Due to the unavailable access to Adobe and other advanced programs in the devices I have, I used a free drawing application called Medibang Paint. These four images are the key steps of my process on the construction and illustration of the building.

As shown in the images above, I attempted to execute the axonometric projection technique by creating a plan of the building I will be drawing. The basic structure of the building was then formed by rotating the plan and drawing vertical lines that resembles walls. However, an issue I encountered is that the proportions and area of the rooms were not as what I had in mind. Hence, I decided to cut down some parts of the building and spent more time to fix its dimensions and scale.

These images documents my process on achieving the final structure and appearance of the building, with necessary furniture added and "wall layers" present. I have also adopted selections of colours that were of a 'neutral' mix instead of a diverse and colourful palette, in order to achieve similar concepts of colour in Building Stories.

Some interior designs, furniture and structures of the illustrated building is heavily referenced and inspired by the features of the actual building I am living in and some images I have taken (shown near the end of this portfolio). With almost no experience and little understanding on architecture concepts, I find this method easier as I am familiar with the space I will be drawing.

Storyboards

Below are sketches of the characters that will be included in the final illustration and some draft storyboards that were used for my final illustration.

Final Illustration

In my final illustration I have drawn the "three-dimensional" or the isometric projection of the building and drawn characters and their ordinary stories in a similar comical style to Building Stories. Slightly deviating from Building Stories' comics about the histories of their characters, I have included comics which represents the current events that were happening in the house (ex. spider comic). I have drawn arrows to connect the certain objects in the house to the comic shorts, used hardly any dialogues, coloured using the cell-shading technique and included the blue thinking bubbles. These are some of the important elements that were incorporated into my illustration that were taken from Chris Ware's illustrations in Building Stories.

Inspirations