Portraits of Andrew Tan

PART OF MY COMIC STRIP PAGE LAYOUT SERIES

Comic Strip Layout Inspiration from Andrew Tan

The previous article about Andrew Tan we looked at a couple of his Instagram posts of ink and tonal urban sketches in a comic strip layout, and today we’re looking at his use of a limited colour palette and negative space in his comic strip panels.

Andrew Tan Instagram Posts #1

It’s second nature to grab for the watercolour palette and add lots of bright colours to a sketches, but in this first Instagram post, Andrew Tan illustrates how effective it is to use a limited colour palette. He’s used plenty of negative space to add brightness and light to these earthy tones, and he’s also added a little dash of red in a couple of places.

Depending on how you read the page, the occurrence of the use of colour as a focal point can act as the entry point into the page. But in this case, the focal point feels like the top sketch because of it’s size and the large block of white in the centre of the sketch, so it feels as though that dash of red helps to draw you’re eye down to lead you off the page.

Andrew Tan Instagram Posts #2

In this second post, Andrew uses similar muted earth tones, and to balance out the heavy use of solid areas of colour, he’s created an effective visual balance by including loose line drawings of people as focal points in there of the sketches. The odd cell out is the bottom right, where there’s hardly any negative space, just a mass of earth tones. The centrally place figure takes up most of the cell, so it’s easy to accept him as the focal point. He also has a brown shirt which stands out against the earthy-green tones of the background.

If I’d done this layout, I would have felt I needed to follow the same pattern as the previous three cells, and just added a line drawn figure, but this would have been too predictable and balanced. How Andrew has changed the format of this last cell creates a nice balance to the close up of the glass in the top right.

The guy in the brown shirt and the glass are both close ups, and whereas the guy is in a darkened cell, the glass is surrounded by lots of white space.

It’s easy to find balance in this layout, and for your eye to get drawn down to that cell in the lower right, which is the natural exit at the end of the page.

In Summary

Andrew Tan is a prolific comic strip sketcher, and I’m sure by now, all of his artistic decisions are done intuitively. But from a novice comic strip sketcher like myself, it’s a useful exercise to analyse his layouts that work so well, and to reverse-engineer why they feel successful to me.

I was watching a Liz Steel video on her Patreon earlier this week, and she mentioned that she often does thumbnails of her sketches after she’s done them to analyse why the composition works and how to improve it. I think this reverse-engineering approach is a winner.