THE FOREST By Gareth A Hopkins
FOUND FOREST RAW
Found Forest Floor is an abstract graphic novel by Gareth A Hopkins and Erik Blagsvedt, edited and published by David Quiles Guillo which was released in 2017. And here’s where I stop talking in the third person. I made the art for Found Forest Floor by reworking pages as I produced them—once I was happy with a page I’d scan it, level it, occasionally mess with it in Photoshop, then print it out and draw over the top of it, and then start that process again. I’d usually have between five and ten pages ready to work on at any time, and carried them around with me so I could work on them whenever the feeling took me. A lot of the time this was in Smithfield Rotunda Park (most famous for being the location of the stand-in MI6 base in the Bond film ’Skyfall’) but I also did them in the Rhodes Centre café while my daughter was in her ballet class, Manor Of Groves waiting area while my son did his swimming lesson, at my table at Thought Bubble 2016, and sometimes just at home. However, before I started that process, the book was going to look very different. I started with a far more conventional Abstract Comics style of familiar panel layouts, where the visual language was a bit clearer. I did 50 in total, but despite for the most part being happy enough with them, they had a few notable shortcomings. For a start, they were very dense and left almost no room for Erik’s writing to breathe once it was finally in there. Secondly, the style from page to page was changing—as you read through this will probably be obvious. Essentially I was still trying to work out how the book would look as I made it, which isn’t the best way to do it. Third, it was taking far, far too long. David had set a very ambitious target for me, of having the art finished within a few months, but working in this traditional way had left me way off target, and necessity being the mother of invention, I started that reworking thing.
What’s here then, in this document, are the 50 pages I made before the reworking started, presented in chronological order. Sticking them in chronologically means that the progress from my first fumblings for a visual style, through to something I was comfortable with and back out the other side again, is as clear as it’s ever going to be. Some of the content here will be familiar if you’ve read Found Forest Floor—in some cases whole pages, and sometimes whole sequences of pages, were included as-is in the final book. In other cases I picked out panels I liked and repeated them or combined them with other panels I liked, and a few of those panels are peppered throughout the book (I was actually surprised how many times some of those panels appeared, actually). The drawings had a few sources. I started off just playing with shape and contrast to see what might work, and there wasn’t a lot of content. Sometimes I cheated and repeated a trick I was trying to move away from, which was to re-draw comic pages I liked—I can tell you for sure there are redraws of The Complete Don Quixote, Batman Adventures and Doc Dino in there, because I still recognise them, but some others might have snuck in too. Predominantly though these are studies from my life. The statue that stands in the middle of Smithfield Rotunda Park shows up a lot, as do some of the people who were eating their lunch there, and some plantlife from the beds there. There are a lot of drawings from photographs I took on holiday, mostly from a family holiday in Wales. One page is drawings of my wife which I did while we sat in our old kitchen which she didn’t know I was doing. I’m really proud of these pages, and didn't want them to go to waste, hence this little collection. Some of them might show up again elsewhere, who knows. Either way, thanks for taking a look. Gareth.
Found Forest Floor is available via print-on-demand from the following address:
https://www.createspace.com/7348194
Gareth A Hopkins:
http://www.grthink.com http://intercorstal.com
Erik Blagsvedt:
http://erikblagsvedt.tumblr.com/
https://medium.com/@eblagsvedt
7tnbjv:
http://7tnbjv.com
Found Forest Raw: all content copyright Gareth A Hopkins 2018
THE FOREST By Gareth A Hopkins
