Aditya Bidikar is a comic-book letterer and occasional writer based in India.
As I mentioned in a previous Status Update, I’m trying to get back to draw as my back issues recede. Plus, my friend Nitin helped me figure out a drawing setup that doesn’t require me to hunch over my iPad, so I’ve been drawing again.
I don’t know yet if I can draw on paper again – I’ll have to set up the boards and see if I can fix it up at the correct angle. But in the meantime, I’m just happy to be drawing again.
(more…)These are two drawings that I made on the iPad ten months apart – one in August 2022, the other this June.
I’ve always been fascinated by negative space in drawings. As a comics creator, I think negative space defines how we approach storytelling. It’s not just gaps in the art – how we draw the eye and where – negative space is fundamental to writing a comic too. Scott McCloud talks about this as closure – someone looking at the space between panels and filling in what happens there.
(more…)Right before the title drop in Across the Spider-Verse, Spider-Gwen leaves her house and swings out into the sky – does her Spidey thing. It’s a great visual sequence, and I was struck by a fleeting moment where she nearly disappears into the white sky, only standing out by the black and red of her costume.
I wanted to draw that moment, and I wanted to draw it from memory, before I watched the movie for a second time.
Late December, I’m not quite sure why, I felt moved to make some diary comics. I’d had a few conversations with artist friends, one of whom recommended that a good way to improve my drawing fast would be to make comics (these are not those, though). But mainly, I’d just finished making our “Monkey Man” comic, and wanted to continue marinating in comics thinking.
Anyway, I made four. I’m not sure I’ll be making more, but they were rather fun to make. Each took 20-30 minutes, and I got to improvise making comics – that subtle chemistry of text and image. Here you go: