Narrative Development: 'Strands'

 A short story I created called 'Strands', inspired by this drawing from one of my old sketchbooks (left), which was in turn inspired by a panel from Junji Ito's 'Tomie' (right).

I initially came up with the idea when I was looking through old personal sketchbooks, as I used to do a lot of inkwork, which is something I want to venture back into with this project. Similarly to the 10 Panel narrative workshop, I wanted to find an image to use as a visual reference to then form a story around; I feel like this short story format is a good one for horror narratives, as it allows me to explore ideas and concepts without the need for a lot of exposistion or any real world building, which i find can often lessen the effectiveness of horror stories with a lot of ambiguity. 

I also took a little conceptual inspiration from the japanese horror film 'EXTE' (2007).

I wanted to play around with textures and contrast within this short. At this point I'm pretty much decided that I going to work monochromatically throughout this project, partly as a reference to Junji Ito, but mostly as a way to emphasize other aspects of drawing; working without colour with force me to experiment more with things like contrast and mark-making, which I think could create some very effective visuals when I'm working with more visceral details in horror scenes. 

Strands