How I Started Making Visual Stories
And 5 ways you can too
This post was previously published as “Five Ways to Start Making Graphic Essays” at Brevity, a fabulous literary journal devoted to flash nonfiction.
For more detailed process info and how I use Procreate, check out:
Thanks for reading The Habit of Art by Kelcey Ervick, a Substack Featured Publication (twice!). I love writing and drawing these posts and am grateful to everyone who follows along. I’m a writer and professor in Indiana. If you like this newsletter, you might like my graphic memoir, The Keeper, which was featured in the New York Times Book Review’s Holiday Gift Guide and is 40% off at the place that rhymes with Shazam-a-zon. If you’re interested in the book I mentioned here on making comics and visual stories, you can find it here: The Field Guide to Graphic Literature (or here). I have other books too! Thanks for your support!
This is great—thanks Kelcey. I started doing graphic memoir/memoir comics a few years back when I had a show coming up about my mother's Lewy Body dementia and death (and my relationship with her). I wanted to make a "visual memoir", though I still didn't know what that would mean. I started trying to do memoir comics because it seemed the best way to *illustrate* (pun intended) the stories I had to tell, but it was extremely frustrating for me at first. I was trying to work too small, I was too stuck on making everything look "realistic", and I'd set up these very rigid panels to work within. As I worked toward the show, I eventually both loosened up and also started to make much larger pieces (the largest graphic memoir piece in the show was 42 by 78 inches). Now I'm working my way back to the graphic memoir (in book form) that I started when the show ended, and I'm hoping for it to be very loose and painterly. I'm so rusty with painting though, it's scary just thinking about it! But I'll get there.
I love the way you found your path with this, and how you can translate your own experience into steps we can take! So mind-expanding as I transition from being only a writer (who started out as an artist, with a comics focus) to focusing on comics. The dance between what’s best represented by image and what needs text, and how much, is one of the greatest creative thrills of my life. Thanks for feeding and fueling the thrills! 🙏