Frequently-Asked Questions

Some questions come up a lot on our Discord server, and to make life easier for everyone, I have started collecting (hopefully) more elaborate answers here.

Index

Where do I start?
Where can I learn more about Visual Storytelling?

Newcomers on the Discord server often ask, “Where do I start?” It is impossible to answer that question without knowing more about where you are and what you want to achieve.

It would also be helpful if you could show us some of your current work so we can see where you are.

Below is a list of questions for you to consider. You do not have to answer all the questions. Try to find the questions whose answers most reflect where you want to go, and then share that on the Discord. No guarantees, but maybe someone can help. Worst case, you hopefully have more clarity and can start to figure out the next steps yourself.

Whatever you do, make sure you answer the very last question because it is the most important one to ask yourself.

Questions You Can Ask Yourself:

1) What kind of output do you want to make?

Do you want to make Manga? Comics? (Manga? American-style floppies? Franco-Belgian albums, graphic novels, online webcomics?)

Or do you want to be a concept artist for the games or film industry?

Or do you want to be a children’s book artist?

Or do you want to become a tattoo artist?

Or do you want to go into animation? 2D or 3D?

Or do you want to make abstract or fine art?

Or do you want to go into storyboarding?

2) How much time do you have?

How much time can you spend each day? Each week? How many years do you want to devote to becoming better?

3) Money

Do you need or want to make money with it? How much? Immediately, or do you have some savings? Do you have to make money with your art, and how much? Do you want to make money with your art?

What do you want to make money with? Do you want to work on commission? Make pieces to be sold in galleries? Comics? Webcomics? Portraits (of pets)?

Alternatively, how much budget do you have for courses and academies? Which classes and academies might help you reach your goal, and why? Which academies are near you? Are you willing and able to move to other cities to be near other academies?

4) What medium do you want to work in?

Do you want to work in pen, brush and ink, pencil, watercolor, or oil paint? Or do you want to draw digitally? Or use 3D modeling tools?

5) Who are the artists you admire?

Which artists or artworks have you fallen in love with so much that you want to draw or paint like that? Who were the artists they admired? This gives you clues about which direction to go and what to study.

6) What is your skill level?

How good are your drawing skills? Please also show what you are drawing right now.

7) Do you want to design your own curriculum or follow a laid-out lesson plan?

Do you have a clear idea of your learning path? Are you just looking for information? If so, what information are you looking for?

If you are looking for a laid-out plan: what do you want to learn, and at what level, and what kind of budget are you willing to spend on it?

Last (And Most Important) Question:

Define success. What does success look like in your plans? What does it look like in your daydreams to achieve the goal you are after? Where do you hope to be in one, two, five, or ten years? What do you hope your life will be like, your output will be like? This is a crucial question because more experienced artists might come up with information you didn’t even know you needed when they understand what you are ultimately aiming at.

As you can see, the answers to the question “where do I start?” can be so wide-ranging depending on your goal that no experienced artist could possibly answer that question before knowing more.

One First Tip

Whatever you plan to do, it is a great idea to have a sketchbook and a pen or pencil. Make sure the materials are cheap enough that you aren’t afraid to draw in or write with them. Don’t make finished pieces in it yet, but use it as a laboratory. Do write in your sketchbook, also! Use it as a space to start exploring ideas. For example, use it as a space to begin exploring answers to the above questions.

I sometimes use sketchbooks to work through coding ideas! A sketchbooking habit is a blessing for life, no matter which creative direction you take.

Visual Storytelling is a way of thinking about arranging abstract elements within a frame so they support the telling of the story as a visual metaphor for the story situation.

Think things like one person clearly towering over another person to indicate that that person has power over the other person, or a person who is shown between two big dark looming shapes to depict that they are in a bit of a pickle, or a person who has some grid of shadow lines over them to describe that they are in some metaphorical prison at that moment in the story.

There are too many of those examples to list here, but it is also a way of thinking you can learn. When you get the idea, you start to see how Visual Storytelling is used in films. Going to the movies will never be the same again, as you see them also at another level. Regular viewers will “feel” the Visual Storytelling, but you will be able to notice what they did.

To start, the book Framed Ink is the best book I know on the subject. It is absolutely spectacular and packed with information and examples.

There is also a fantastic blog on the subject. Mark Kennedy, the maker of that blog, stopped long ago, but the blog is still available. He’s a storyboard artist and worked on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hercules, Tarzan, and Tangled.

You will have to dig deeper into the older posts, but it’s absolute gold and info I haven’t found elsewhere. Here are example posts.

Here is also a rave review about that blog , along with suggested reading from that blog:

After reading these, you can do it on your own as you understand the thinking behind them, recognize the Visual Storytelling techniques they use in films, and come up with new ones yourself, as you know how to think about Visual Storytelling.

A good thing to do after that is look up the 100 top Directors of Photography of all time in Hollywood, look up the films they worked on, gain access to these films and freeze frames, and copy them as thumbnails into your sketchbook (first make a page with a whole grid of small-ish rectangles you can fill with little thumbnail studies of frames). You will now be able to recognize all the Visual Storytelling tricks they used yourself, and let these masters be your teacher. It blew my mind when I started doing that. Godfather 1, the first half hour alone, wow... but read the book and the blog first.

That is my recommendation if you want to learn Visual Storytelling.