How I made my eagle comic

The eagle comic tells a story that I thought of when a white bellied sea eagle followed me up the river in Ku ring gai national park. This is how I made it.

I made a rough eagle out of some hessian left over from an art somewhere, an old t-shirt of my dad’s and some scrap fabric and yarn.

I sketched out a more character-driven shape of the eagle that I saw, drawing on ideas from animation character design where I worried a bit less about the taxonomic shape and more about the feel of the eagle I saw.

I wrote out the text of the comic in notesapp, and thought about where a ‘panel’ would be.

I got a hessian sack from reverse garbage, cut it in half and lined it to stop fraying, this would guide the size of my grid.

I played with the outline of the grid, including the large eagle of the final panel.

I drew out patterns of the abdomen, legs, breast, face and beak on an old sheet, and embroidered them with wool.

With the shape of the final eagle done, I worked upwards, making panel shapes first with paper bags and then patterning them with fabric.

I used various mending techniques – stitching, weaving and crocheting to make different elements, including plastic-bag fish.

I used loose stitches to make sure my text was aligned

At times I returned to my remarkable to plot how panels would fit together.

The top panel was last, that’s because I wove together all the scraps in from the making of the other panels and used them as backdrops.

The eagle shapes were much more consisten than my first draft. That’s because of the design rules I had set.

Then I sewed all of the panels down, and lined the hessian bag.