When I was a child my mother used to read books to me every night, and while she read, oftentimes I would draw. As I grew up, I would thirst for story after story. I would tear through books, comics, films, and so on. Eventually, I began drawing comic books. At first, they would be comics starring characters I enjoyed reading about at the time, such as Spider- Man or Captain Underpants. One day, this changed, when I invented my first comic book character: The Transformer. He had a mask grafted to his face, which gave him the ability to transform any part of his body into whatever he could imagine. In art class, while my peers drew familiar cartoon characters, or real life sports figures, I would be drawing wild heroes and villains for the Transformer to interact with. During this time vast worlds and battles between good and evil would flow from my pencils and markers.
When middle school rolled around, I reached another very important part of my life. In 7th grade, one of my previous teachers, Adam Knapp, asked me to teach in his kindergarten class. He was teaching them simple reading and writing, and he decided to teach it through comics, and he felt that I would be the perfect person to have by his side. This was a very good time for me to examine the medium in a new way. Since I needed to teach it, I had to approach it in a way which I had never done before. In the past, I would have vague plot points, and let the story be primarily driven by what I wanted to draw when I was sitting with the blank page. When I got into the class, the first thing I told the class was that behind any great comic was a great story. We brainstormed all kinds of different characters who could star, and eventually ended up with a prince puppy. They were, after all, in kindergarten. Once we came up with the story for the puppy, I showed them different methods of drawing, and taught them about penciling, inking, and coloring their comics. We all had great fun, and I learned as much as they did. I did so well that Adam asked me come back in 8th grade to teach his class again, and I did so gladly.
In 8th grade I also created a character named Void, a female cybernetic bounty hunter who is stuck in the future. At first, I drew a short comic about her, as I had done many times with the Transformer. Although I didn’t have a script for the project, I knew where the story was going to go, and I knew what was going to be on each page long before I started drawing it. I continued using this method into my freshman and sophomore years of high school, when I took Void, and used her as the star of a webcomic. To improve my writing skills, I took two creative writing classes. One of my final pieces was an 11 page single spaced story starring Void, which I posted online and used as a supplement to the webcomic to help flesh out the character and world in a way which the comic hadn’t yet been able to.
I currently attend The University of the North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), where I have been learning a wide variety of artistic skills, and abilities in their Visual Arts department. I’ve been learning about everything from color theory to welding, which, by the way, I love. My first piece that technically used a script I did as a junior at UNCSA, where I used it as a final paper in English class, which received an A+. Since then, I have been working on small bits and pieces here and there, but nothing extremely substantioal. At this point in time, I want to continue to create comics for a career. As I think about it, however, I realize I don’t know if that’s what I will get do, or want to do, for the rest of my life. While choosing colleges and programs to apply to, I have been doing a lot of soul searching, trying to merge what is important to me now, and what I have always enjoyed. I love drawing. Always have, always will. I also love stories, both telling them, and experiencing them. That is why I have decided that I want to go into a school with a good illustration program. If I do so, I will be able to continue to draw comics and tell stories without being limited to that in the future. I’ll be able to become a more well rounded artist, and human being.
Now, we come around to the point of this blog. As I move ahead with my life, into college, across the country, and so on, this will be my way of sharing what I do with the rest of the world, and my way of taking all of you on a bit of a journy with me. To start out, at the moment, I’m working on restarting my Void project. For a while, this blog will follow that project, and eventually lead to the comic being on this site. But, more on that later. Right now, it’s time to sleep.
-Ivan Potter-Smith