Alina Sandu (IDEA Grad 2022) shares her Week 3 blog post about her practicum at Johnnie Christmas, a Vancouver-based graphic novelist.

“One must be ready to just churn out progress to daily get the comic done, let alone meet the deadlines.” writes Alina.

Check out Alina's practicum story!

BLOG ENTRY #3

March 14 – March 18, 2022

Frankly, I felt like a human pendulum this week. Maybe it’s because I hit the halfway point of my practicum, maybe it’s something else. Either way, this week was a ride one way or another.

Speaking of the halfway point, I had a zoom mid-point meeting at 1 pm on Monday. The call went as smoothly as the rest of that Monday. The morning was spent putting together social media posts, and then in the afternoon, I was assigned three more spreads to draw in background characters.

Tuesday, however, ended up being a drag. It wasn’t really the work, but I’ll admit that I just couldn’t focus for whatever reason. As such, I was slow to work through my three spreads, enough so that Johnnie handed me two more spreads on top of that. And though I had received advice to solve this by walking away from the computer for a bit, I knew the moment I turned away my parents would rope me into doing house chores for the rest of the day. And so, I ended up overcoming my temporary art block by focusing on putting together more social media posts instead. It helped somewhat. I managed to get some of my social media posts done including the mockups and even handed in a finished spread to hand in.

And then the pendulum swings back, Wednesday went as smoothly as Monday. I was so much more concentrated, and I finished all my spreads but one. My Thursday was tedious, but I finished my last spread and put together more social media posts. And then my Friday was fine, where I put together the rest of the social media posts and had my weekly call with Johnnie (where I had to go back and fix some of my spreads again but baby steps…).

What I Learned:

One of the small things I learned was that, although unnecessary, it’ll be better if I match my style more to his. In his experience, he’s had assistants that worked in their own styles, and as the lead artist, it was part of his role to redraw the assistants’ work in his own style so it’s cohesive. The second thing I learned was that “it’s always a weird time”. This was something I not only picked up from how my own week went but also immediately when I started my call where I managed to catch Johnnie in the middle of writing an email along with having four other things opened. And that this is natural when making a comic, and as such it’s important to be as concise as possible. Moreover, one must be ready to just churn out progress to daily get the comic done, let alone meet the deadlines.

For more on Alina see alinasandu.com.