When was the last time you really looked around you?
Over a four-month period in 2016, Andrew North sat in the same spot in the massive open-air Eliava hardware market in Tbilisi, Georgia drawing a 360º panoramic view of the stalls and sellers of Soviet-era wares. Although he’d only recently started to learn Georgian, he was fascinated by the scene and got to know the vendors on his repeated visits — and that’s when the story emerged.
People have been telling stories through art for millennia. In journalism, drawings can add feeling, intimacy and clarity to a piece. Drawing compels us to slow down, look closer and bring the human into the story. As technology advances to automate images, this practice of connecting with people and places by looking becomes more important than ever.
North, a journalist and writer who often mixes reportage with drawing, told how he created his interactive story, The Big Draw: Selling the Soviet Past, at the ZEG Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi, Georgia last month, which gathered together storytellers from across the globe and across media forms. With him was artist and writer Molly Crabapple who spoke about her own journey into visual storytelling.
For Crabapple — best known for her award-winning work documenting the Syrian War, Guantanamo Bay, Occupy Wall Street and other global conflicts — drawing creates a different relationship with the subject.
The act of sitting down to draw a person or a scene goes around the omnipresence and immediacy of a photo, she said. It requires “deep looking,” especially now, when there are more mobile phones than people on Earth.
Journalism through drawings
As an artist, you have to bring the same level of rigor to a journalistic drawing as a photojournalist would to a photograph — but there is some creative license. Crabapple was one of only three artists allowed to visit the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, one of the most visually-censored places in the world, while on assignment for Vice covering hearings in 2013.
There, photos were mostly prohibited and notebooks heavily monitored. As she described at the ZEG Festival, security guards screened and approved her sketches with a sticker before she could leave the courtroom.
Crabapple used the example of how she was not allowed to draw the faces of the guards at Guantanamo, giving them cartoonish smiley faces instead. The result shows the absurdity and horror of the situation.
Jenny Kroik is a New York City-based illustrator with little love for writing, as she feels like she can never get her point across how she wants.
“Drawing allows me to transmit feelings, as well as ideas that I am not sure how to say in words,” said Kroik, who has created several covers and illustrated stories for the New Yorker magazine and myriad other publications. “But somehow, through paint, people seem to get what I’m trying to say, and even pick up on things I was thinking but didn’t know I was including in the art.”
Brooklyn-based artist Matt Rota conveys similar feelings in his editorial illustration. “My drawing tends to focus on the realistic as much as the psychological details of a scene,” he said. “Drawing allows me to build a mood and tell complex narratives in single images.”
Get started with a mix of materials and styles.
To capture the mood of a scene, you have to draw quickly in the moment. And like any muscle, it requires regular practice to build up your strength.
“The most important thing is to go get a sketchbook, and start drawing in public places,” Rota said. “Look for subjects that are around you, and that you are interested in, and try to tell a story. Become comfortable drawing quickly without thinking too much.”
Experimenting with different mediums and tools will also help you find the mood for your story. “Try drawing from life with a lot of different tools, pens, pencil, charcoal,” said Rota. “Draw with big brushes and things you don’t have a lot of control over, and allow yourself to be surprised at the results.”
Comics and graphic novels are another hugely popular form of visual storytelling — and not just for kids. In France and Belgium, comics, or bande-dessinée, are recognized as “the ninth art” in the hierarchy of artistic mediums. One in four books sold in France in 2022 was a graphic novel.
Malaka Gharib is a journalist, cartoonist and author of two graphic memoirs, “I Was Their American Dream” and “It Won’t Always Be Like This.” Her advice is to use a mix of storytelling features to bring your story to life.
“Make sure that every element in your comic is saying a different thing,” Gharib said. “You might have a speech bubble, a drawing of a character and a box with some narration in it.”
The beauty and effectiveness of comics lies in their simplicity. But with limited panels to get your story across, you have to use the space wisely. “If you color the sky blue in your drawing, your character doesn’t have to say ‘the sky is blue’,” she said. “The reader can already see it.”
Be creative, be realistic.
For anyone starting out in the field, Kroik advises you to question, and remember, why you’re interested in visual storytelling in the first place.
“Do it because you are really excited to tell stories,” she said. “Check your motivation for making art periodically, because if your motivation is to win praise in any form — “likes”, fame, money — your career might be a tough one.”
Kroik notes there is constantly something threatening to replace artists, whether photography, stock art or AI, and there’s constantly someone who wants to automate what artists do to make a profit and keep it to themselves.
“It can be a struggle,” she said. “But if you’re excited to tell stories, it will keep you going, even if you have a very small audience, or even an audience of one — you!”
After all she said, “telling stories is what makes us human.”
