Found Objects #2: Mandala Motifs

Experimenting with timing and unconventional page layouts.

A few days ago, I completed a new page for the second part of Finding Hope, and I thought I’d share it with you all here.

This is the second page in a sequence that explores how I became interested in revisiting Hope’s memoir and learning more about her back story.

At this point in the narrative, I was living in Kathmandu, Nepal, surrounded by ancient temples and Thangka paintings. I decided that it would be fitting to format these panels within a mandala-inspired motif.

There are three rings representing the countries where I spent ten years of my life: Nepal, Colombia, and Korea. The combination of these rings expresses the cyclical nature of time and repetitive experiences, including learning languages, adapting to culture, love, heartbreak, and saying goodbye. This format also allowed me to summarize ten years of my life on a single page. Of course, a lot happened in those years, but within this one page, the reader has enough information to understand my character’s emotional state. Timing is so important in comics, and I’ve been challenging myself to condense content into short sequences without losing the impact of that moment in the narrative. 

In my sketches, I initially illustrated scenes within each of these panels. I drew moments where I was teaching, learning new skills, and exploring. Soon, I realized that I needed to discard such obvious and straightforward imagery. I flipped through hundreds of old photos on my hard drive and began to see how much I documented patterns from nature, textiles, and architecture. I experimented with the placement of non-representational designs alongside recognizable scenery and hand-lettering. I simplified some of the scenes and focused on incorporating color within the linework to contrast against the black outlines in the rest of the story. Overall, I’m happy with the final art and the flow of the text. I like how the page appears between those with more traditional gridded layouts. 

However, I often feel stressed about the time I spend on each of these pages. Because I began working on this project a few years ago, I’ve been patching old pages together with new content, and the process has been roundabout and redundant. I’ve drafted so much of this book, but it often takes an entire day just to get back into it. I have to remind myself that I’m not making this book for anyone but myself. If it was for a client, I would have already finished it, but it would be rushed and half-baked with adequate art.

I want each page to be beautiful and cinematic. I want the reader to flow through the story in a way that is skillfully timed and well-designed. There are so many choices to make in comics, and I’ve enjoyed experimenting with composition and page layouts while maintaining the visual language that I established in my original pages. Not every page will be this complex, but I hope to keep a balance and rhythm throughout the book to allow for more of these moments.