Why making art is a cosmological miracle. When I was researching my sci-fi show Parallax back in 2017, I spent a lot of time learning about xenology. Xenologists think about biology, chemistry, physics and so on as they might relate to alien species, and my own thinking was that if…

I filled five whole sketchbooks in 2020 — and my drawing ability has improved significantly. I even drew my first comic! This is down, in many ways, to changing how I use my sketchbook. Before I begin, I should say I am not a trained artist, just an enthusiastic amateur…

A comic short story by Adam Westbrook

A good idea feels nebulous at first. In my experience, a good idea almost never appears fully formed. It’s more like a vast gas cloud in space: a feeling here, a colour there, a quote, a couple of chords that float past your nostrils and evaporate. Whatever it is, you like it, but you can’t attach it…

I have thought about this advice, from designer Frank Chimero, a lot over the last year: once through, cleanly. It’s very simple: when you are beginning a new project, create it in a format that means you can complete the idea in a single sitting. If you are developing a…

How Jason Lutes masters visual storytelling. On my desk sits a framed page of storyboards from Hayao Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away. Spin the frame around and on the other side is a print from Scott McCloud’s graphic novel The Sculptor.

James Clear’s book Atomic Habits is as good as everyone says it is. With minimal self-help fluff, he presents a tangible and usable process for building good habits and getting rid of bad ones. The big revelation for me was Clear’s distinction between goals and systems. Our outcome-orientated society cares…

A simple straight line that will elevate your visual storytelling One day, when I was storyboarding a complicated film for The New York Times, I realised something about how visual stories function. I took out a pencil and some paper and drew a straight horizontal line, like this: Then above the line, I wrote these words:

A non-exclusive list for filmmakers, graphic novelists and other sequential artists. The first ever screenplay was a list. Film, video, TV and comics are all sequential art: images arranged in a specific order across time or space. Superior to all the other decisions a storyteller makes is the sequencing of…