Brian Russell is an illustrator whose humor may seem familiar to many: the situations in the comics he draws are like those most of us experience in our daily lives. This is probably because Brian’s art comes from a very personal place.
“The family of characters is based on my family. Me, my wife and my three children,” he told Bored Panda. “We always make each other laugh with real and imaginary scenarios. Co-workers and other people who appear in the comics are usually based on people I’ve met.”
Scroll down to see Brian’s most recent work, and don’t forget to check out the artist’s previous post here.
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We asked Brian about his creative process: “The drawing part of my comics usually takes me about two hours from start to finish. I usually sketch with a pencil on paper that I have a template for, then ink on my computer. Now, the writing part? That’s unpredictable! Some jokes are easy and write themselves, and some have been sitting half-written in my drafts for years!
I don’t know if any of my techniques are unusual, per se. One thing I don’t know other people do is laugh while doing my comics. I guess that’s a good sign that I think what I’m doing is fun! Say oh! But there are a lot of videos of me from my weekly Twitch live streams where I’ll draw a part and just laugh.”
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“It’s almost always difficult to come up with new ideas,” the artist says of the creative block he faces. “Lately, I’ve made a decision not to push too many ideas. I try to write down life-based ideas as they come up. I write notes on my phone or whatever and sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don’t. If the idea doesn’t work, I put it aside and work on something else.
For me, it helps to have some deadlines. My brain likes boxes and constraints, so sometimes just knowing the deadline is coming will help organize some of those ideas. A lot of times I start writing a comic and realize that the joke doesn’t actually work as well as I thought when I drew it, but you just have to figure it out or twist. I try to have at least two comics in progress in my brain so if one doesn’t work, I can move on to the other.
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When asked about future plans, the artist told us, “I’ve really enjoyed making lightly animated comics for TikTok and YouTube. The more I spend doing that, the more I think about how a comic will look animated and that influences the way I draw comics. I hope to continue practicing with this style of animation and voice acting and have a good time with it. Someday it would be great to write another book, but at the moment I’m having fun just making people laugh with comics and animation.
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