This Afternoon

Description

This Afternoon is a short comic set in a small, fictional fishing community in Newfoundland in the Summer of 1914, and follows a family and the events of an afternoon.

This comic is a sort of small prequel set about five years before the main story, for which information, updates, and art can be found primarily on Instagram and Bluesky.

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Read the comic!

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Process

Development

For me, working within historical fiction means I try to learn as much as I can about the setting being depicted as possible before I start confidently writing and illustrating the work I want to make. My whole first semester of this year was spent condensing down research I had already done, doing more focused research into very specific areas, and filling in the gaps in my knowledge as they appeared throughout this process.

My end-of-semester project in the Winter was a concept art and research book—some pages of which are shown here—that collected together what I had learned so far in one place and gave me a reference to look at while I was making the comic itself in my second semester. What I needed to research spanned from specifics of cod trap fishing to constructing box houses to just learning how to draw different types of grass.

There’s so much for me still to learn as I go forward with this project and others, and I’m excited to continue developing better research practices and including what I learn in my art and writing.

I enjoy the research process as much as I enjoy making the art; I have a lot of fun figuring out all the tiny bits of history that I’m illustrating and being able to put what I’ve learned onto paper through storytelling.

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Other Work