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Artist Statement
I am a graphic narrative illustrator and a comic book artist working primarily with fine ink lines. My subject matter revolves around iconographic traditions of Golden Age illustrators such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, and my work can be described as being the visual progeny of Harry Clarke’s drawings and Winsor McCay’s Sunday morning cartoon panels.
Formally, I am interested in exploring the relationships between lines. I maintain a uniform and arguably flattening line value throughout my work, but I am concerned with how a line creates depth and space depending on its relationship to other lines. The greater the number of lines, the more compellingly volumetric the space can potentially become.
My visual source of Golden Age Western illustration also informs my subject matter. I am particularly interested in unearthing the contemporary implications of fairy tales. My work explores how fairy tales are re-appropriated and consumed in today’s culture, and how those deeply gendered images affect the visual language we use to convey concepts of purity, depravity, love, sex, and heroism. The images I create feature elegant figures with surreally detailed masses of ink-contour hair cascading about sparingly outlined bodies.
By re-appropriating a visual language of fairy tales from popular books penned and illustrated over a century ago, I highlight the seemingly aged nature of fairy tale themes while concurrently reminding the viewer that we inherit the legacy of the traumas and triumphs of our iconographic past. I aim to ensnare that legacy within the confines of my dark ink contours.
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Not especially, and I think I feel that way because getting caught up in jealousy is unproductive and completely not conducive to improving my own work.
I’m pretty comfortable with the fact that there are lots of people who are far more skilled than me and much more experienced . There always will be. And I think that’s amazing.
I LOVE images, and I love good draughstmanship. When I see sensuous, sinewy line quality, bold composition, delicate visual tensions, or a beautifully unified palette, I get embarrassingly excited. If an artist is better than me or produces work that moves me more profoundly than what I can put out myself, I always want to see more and more of their work.
A major reason why I make any pictures at all is because I like to find images and certain factures that make me fall in love - I’ll feel inspired and humbled all at once, and I’ll dedicate myself to try to understand and communicate what inspires me about an image.
Like, if I see an image and I love it, I’ll want to figure it out. Is it the composition? The lighting? The application of line? The texture? To me, it honestly feels a little like developing a passionate crush on a person - you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they’re all about. You let them speak to you, and you really try to pay attention to all their little details. Then you fumble around trying to express your burgeoning understanding of them, and even after you’ve moved on, a part of them stays with you in the way you see the world and express yourself.
I once fell in love with a triptych by James Jean called “Poor Thing” when I was seventeen. I don’t think our work is in any way alike or comparable - he’s skilled beyond me by leaps and bounds in a pair of seven-league boots. But there’s this figure in the center of the triptych that is a sort of waif-like, wounded angel statue, and I loved her. I adored the way the whole figure made a subtle S-curve and how Jean accentuated the shadows in the folds of her lips into a distant and cherubic smile. I am still totally enamored by the way that figure echoes a Mannerist ‘odalisque’ and a Chic Young Sunday cartoon strip character at the same time.
And you know what? I find that occasionally some of that will sneak into my work because I had such a strong attachment to it.
I don’t really find myself to be ‘jealous’ of other artists. If I can identify something that they have that I like, it just means that my observational skills are good enough to clue me in on where I fall short and how I can improve. And if I want to eventually be where they are now, it just means that I am really into where they are.
And I guess to proffer a suggestion to the jealousy thing, I think it’s really great to produce self-indulgent work, no matter what the teachers tell you. Find and surround yourself with better work than yours, and love them enough to be able to understand them with your hands (as an artist or a draughtsman) and not just with your eyes (as a viewer).
Then make work that you like. I promise you will improve and that you will eventually become comfortable with how your work progresses if you just keep working.
I’ve been working on a short comic about love, and I’m pretty excited since it’s almost all done!
- $10 drawing commission slots open
Hi guys,
So I just found out today that, due to company reshuffling, I’m going to be out of my current job at the end of May.
As we are moving very soon within the next two months or so, plus all other living expenses and whatnot, finances are going to be pretty tight on my end.
I hate straight-up asking for donations, but I can offer these $10 drawings. They’re black and white, fairly detailed, inked and scanned and sent to you at hi-res, 300 DPI files.
If you are interested, please email me: angrygirlcomics@gmail.com. Please be as detailed as you can in your description of what you’d like me to draw. Limit one character, full body. Another character can be added for $10. If you would like flat colors, it’s $5 extra. I accept Paypal only.
Also, any signal boosting would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you so much.
lots of love,
Wendy
Some samples:
My awesome friend Wendy is doing some commission work to get her through an unfortunate job situation. Go check her out!
I redid the frames. This is much more in line with how I’d like the pages to look. Now to go back and do this to all of them…
A sampling of the Abridged Fairy Stories Zine(c) Trungles 2013
Here are half of the current finished illustrations for the zine.
Some of you have seen it already and saw the preview pdf. Just so you know, I’m adding to it. I’m trying to get it to be at least sixteen princess and accompanying text, so that’ll be upwards of 30 pages.
Afterward, I’ll print it and distribute some randomly in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. We’ll see!
- Would you consider posting a tutorial on how to draw hair? Because I am absolutely in love with the way you draw it, and I don't want to copy it exactly of course, but some pointers would be really nice. QQ
I can give you some step-by-step screenshots, but otherwise it’s pretty self-explanatory. I literally just draw in pencil and then draw every single line with ink. There’s nothing special about the process.
A fellow illustrator prompted me to draw my favorite princess, so I started drawing all of the ones that come to mind.
- Hey! I've been following you for quite some time now, and now I wonder.. are you familiar with the German-American artist/ illustrator J.C. Leyendecker?
I am, actually! I did one of my thesis papers on a comparison between his work and his brother’s work, F.X. Leyendecker. I focused on the overt homoeroticism of F.X.’s Gillette advertisement illustrations in comparison to J.C.’s later works for Colliers. Why do you ask?
And here’s a little pencil drawing of Fran. I don’t work like this often enough, but it’s always fun to do. I’m way out of practice, though. Gotta keep working!
A quick doodle of Fran, my favorite FFXII character.
Anybody remember when Vaan tried to ask her age? Fran is the sassiest.
Finally GhostBook is up on KickStarter!
We thought we’d give KS a try instead of outright pre-orders this time. There’s lots of extra swag to choose from along with the book, and depending how much we raise a limited-edition dust-jacket that will only be available to those who helped us fund the book on KS!
HEY EVERYBODY! I’ll be in this book, along with a slew of other unfairly amazing artists!
Check it out, and help us raise some publishing funds if you can for the Ghostbook :)
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Posts
- Aug 24, 12Don't worry! The aesthetics of the rest of the comic won't change drastically - the pages are a bit bigger, and the text is handwritten for uniformity. I decided the text and the speech balloons for this comic should be integral to the page composition. I'm still playing around with it a bit, but I'm hoping it will give me an opportunity to grow from a formal standpoint.
- Aug 24, 12
Hello folks! It's been a long, long while, but Willow Wood's second chapter starts tomorrow! The first page of the second chapter will be up next as visual tribute pages to Sergio Toppi and Moebius - two masters of illustration who have passed on within the last year.
Thank you for being so patient! I hope you enjoy what's to come. - Jul 12, 12Hey folks!I see you've been checking up for updates, and I'm really happy about it.I'll be involved in a couple little gallery showings, and I've been more than swamped. I'll give you some more updates about that later, but I'm also going back and revamping all the pages of the webcomic for consistency. The process has taken me up through page seven, and I haven't decided if I should keep the old pages up for posterity's sake quite yet. I'll let you know. In the meantime, I am, in fact working on an old webcomic project that I had once nixed.Instead of exploring masses of clear-line illustration, like I have been doing here with Willow Wood, I'll be exploring line value with an ink brush over at PuppyCrush.Thank for following! New pages will be done soon, so keep a lookout!
- Jul 03, 12
- Jun 29, 12
This is the first page I've done so far that has no text. The visual language of my webcomic is a nod back to early 20th century western children's book illustration, and I didn't want comic book movement lines or overemphasized dynamism to happen outside of the figures. I'm challenging myself to convey movement and to imply it in other ways. - Jun 19, 12
- Jun 01, 12
I think we're all connected by stories, by narratives. I think it's necessary for us to encapsulate our experiences within the contours of narratives, however elegant or inelegant, however individual and personal or collective. I feel an urgency to pen monsters and fairies, a visual vernacular that I can use as a vehicle to carry my stories. - May 29, 12
- May 22, 12
- May 03, 12A bit of historyHello dear reader,I sincerely hope this finds you well, and I am extremely honored and grateful that you have found your way here. I apologize for the extremely long dry spell. I am in the midst of a storm of formalities and special send-off obligations at school because I will be the first in my family to attain a college degree. After this, I plan to build my resumé and work part-time to begin to save up for an MFA program. Essentially, that means that this webcomic, this very project, will become my biggest portfolio contribution.I have been working on this webcomic since February of 2012 after I attended a workshop facilitated by a wonderful professor and author, Barrie Jean Borich. It was called "Pictures for the People," and the guest speaker was none other than graphic narrative artist Alison Bechdel! I can't even begin to describe how fiercely I was struck by inspiration after that event. I used to do little horrendously drawn comics in high school, and I don't think I've kept any of them around. I never considered that the graphic narrative could be a powerful means of expression, especially as a first-and-a-half-generation immigrant whose parents insisted that he find a practical and lucrative job. They were just cartoons, right?I fumbled around for a bit in college these past four years, praying all the while that a compromise between happiness and comfort would miraculously fall into my lap, but I have since come to understand my use of the graphic narrative as a sort of compulsion - I know I have to do the legwork to fill the gap between my wildest dreams and my immediate reality. There is no other way; I have to draw. I do it to understand myself and my environment. It is my visually-oriented self struggling through my personal iconographic repertoire in the hopes of building that perfect visual vernacular through which I might attempt to come to an understanding with my world.Since Professor Borich's workshop, I have been taking a City Arts course through the HECUA program. It's an amazing class, and I feel as though through these experiences I have come unbound and free from the shackles of prejudices I didn't even know I had. Why did I inherit a legacy of depreciating certain images by delegating them to the caste of "low art" when the graphic narrative could move the spirit and stir the soul as visual art and as literature? And how can I overcome that legacy? How can we overcome it?I am still trying to figure all that out for myself, but I hope to use this comic as a vehicle to explore my inner self. The comic began as a simple drawing experiment in the form of graphic narrative, but it suddenly grew a name, a plot, and personalities.
Through my Tumblr posts and various pieces I have illustrated in the past few weeks, I have provided some clues as to the nature of Willow Wood and its characters.
How much do you know about Addison, for example? What can you tell me about how you visually code Addison and the way the character looks and behaves? And what if I told you the above illustration is indeed an illustration of Addison?
And what about the Star that tumbles down from the heavens? Do you know she has a name even though it has yet to come up in the pages of the comic?
Do you know that you will eventually run into the Rabbit and the Fox?And I bet you most certainly didn't know that you will soon be introduced to a character you have already seen floating around in development on my Tumblr, the King of the Red Dawn?I am so excited to finally be able to introduce you to all of these characters, all of these names, faces, bodies, masses of swirling hair, and pen contours, to you!Again, thank you so much for keeping up with this project. It means the world to me that someone, anyone, might derive some joy from reading and viewing my little experiment. I look forward to producing some more pages very soon, and I hope you're excited as well!Love,Trungles - Apr 10, 12
- Mar 19, 12Dear everybody - I'm so sorry it's been a while since my last page post! I just finished my midterms and am about to embark on an art-oriented excursion to Chicago today, so it'll be a six-hour train ride.
These panels were tricky this time. The hair is typically really easy for me because most of the time I can improvise it, and it's a relaxing, almost cathartic sort of experience for me. However, it was really important that the hair imply movement in a particular direction in this one, and that took a bit of fairly meticulous planning, and the ink pen was not cooperating with me for the most part. I hate using action lines for dramatic flair, so I'm trying to imply movement with pretty much everything else. Enjoy! - Mar 09, 12
- Mar 09, 12
I had an inspiring conversation with a peer tonight, and decided I needed to pick up all of my haphazard pieces of life and focus on my work. I am going to be SO busy over the next couple weeks that I'm afraid my page updates might be irregular. To that end, the fifteenth page is already drafted and scripted. Yay! Please enjoy, and thank you for reading :) - Mar 09, 12
Hey everybody! I am so pleased right because I have just settled into my process, and it's SO exciting to be doing just that. I even posted the process for the bottom panel on my tumblr for all to see. Just gotta say that I am currently taking a class called City Arts through the HECUA program, and it's been amazing, and it's actually informed the way I do my work!
I'm glad for it, because my life's been going through some rough transitions, and it's just nice to feel comfortable breaking away from what was to what is.
Thank you for all your patience, everybody! - Mar 09, 12
I've had such an incredible emotional roller-coaster tail-end of January, and I apologize for not posting more. SO I MADE TWO PAGES FOR YOU TODAY! I ended up working from 2:00pm until 11:30pm, with a couple little breaks. The dining room table of full of games of Go, comic pages, art supplies, and treatises on photography? Anyhoosies, I have one more internship interview to go. More work.
Also, I'm sorry for the type. I'm honestly just using writing it without too much thought for it (so so so sorry, design people! I still love you, I promise!!!). - Mar 09, 12
- Mar 09, 12I think I figured out the text thing. I'd been bouncing back and forth about it in my head for a while, but I think I'm going to just hand-write all the dialogue. It just looks more natural, more uniform. I wonder what I'm gonna do about the first nine pages, now, though. Uh-oh. Whatever. I'm sure I'll figure something out. In the meantime, so sorry for the delay. Here is page ten!
- Jan 07, 12
Oof! Sorry, it's been a while! While the comic is still very much in experimental growth stages, I didn't want to make changes too rapidly to the formal aspects of the pages. And, of course, as a result of my semester kicking back up, the pages will come out a little more slowly.
Thanks for sticking with me! - Dec 24, 11
- Dec 20, 11
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