The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW), founded by cartoonist Tom Hart, holds Free Friday Night Comics Workshops — you guessed it — every Friday. It’s free, it’s fun, and each session features a different artist teaching their approach to their craft. It’s a great way to end a week and start a weekend, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a love for magical, creative stuff.
One of their latest sessions featured Trinidad Escobar, a poet and illustrator based in California. She presented tanaga komix, a wonderful meld of the short Filipino poem and sequential art. We explored approaches to tanaga by answering questions to stimulate our words, adding four panels, as in comics (or komiks in Tagalog), of images as the visual aspect of or accompaniment to the poem. You can watch the replay here at SAW’s Youtube channel.
Here is the tanaga komik I created during the workshop.
Four boxes of illustrations each depict a bucolic scene, with accompanying lines of a tanaga, clockwise from top left.
Medium: digital. Tools: iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Procreate.
As someone who hovers in a permanent state of in-between, learning the existence of tanaga was a joy, a small unearthing of my heritage. And as shown by the sparsity of posts here and elsewhere, the workshop was another step out of a long creative hibernation for me. I’ve begun to open my sketchbooks again, and dig out my glorious hoard of pens, paints, and brushes analog and digital. The effort just to get to this stage took many months, and often the resistance was far more powerful than I was, and all the sketchbooks and supplies were shoved back to their respective piles of things I couldn’t ignore but did anyway.
It’s a long journey on this struggle bus.
I’ve not stopped. At best, I emerge like a frazzled burrowing owl, snarls and scowls aplenty, in need of coffee and reassurance the world isn’t about to set itself on fire…again. And how long I remain outside my burrow depends on the day and the state of the brain. It’s only sometimes that the nuts are, indeed, a harvest.
Four circles of illustrations each depicting a scene of some catastrophe, with accompanying lines of a tanaga, clockwise from top left.
Medium: digital. Tools: iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Procreate.
Until next time.