Using the manga art form, I'm going to create a story.

Let me explain.

Imagine a story with only one person standing still in a white void, completely emotionless and unmoving. That would be a boring story, because it has no narrative. I want to add narrative to my pictures and to, one day, create my own world and characters to write and draw about. In the future, I want to be the creator of a manga people can sit and read, understanding the characters and setting I have created simply from the pictures I’ve drawn. But I can’t do that with a person standing in a void, which is why I have chosen this challenge.

Manga and anime both tell a story through images, whether moving or not. What I would like to do is create a setting and characters to be placed into a narrative, like manga does. This isn’t something I know too much about. Yes, I have experience drawing manga figures, but something I really haven’t done is give them personality in the image itself. (I always have an idea in my head, but getting it down onto paper for someone else to figure out isn’t as easy as thinking it up in the first place!) And while I can draw manga figures, I’m still quite restricted in what I’ve been practising. Teenage and preteen girls are so much easier for me to draw than adults and boys, and this is something I really want to change.

But I'm not just looking at manga. There are so many different narrative art forms out there which I can learn from, including videos and even typical written stories. I want to incorporate as much of the story telling process into my challenge as feasibly possible.

So, from everything I will learn, and everything I’ve been learning, I’m going to create a short story people can read in the manga art form (kind of like a webcomic, but read from right to left instead of left to right). This will combine characters, emotion, a fictional world and narrative, things I need to improve upon and want to practise.

This will be my arts challenge. No pressure, right?