5 minute read
Creating Worlds By Hand
The Comic Art of Brittney Green
By Scott Berson
Trying to find the words to describe Brittney Green’s work is its own exercise in creativity.
Her characters vibrate with a frantic, living, jagged energy. I feel like one of them could physically reach out and punch me in the face, directly from the page. The colors and textures somehow succeed in marrying the blazing vibrance of 1950s pop art with a noir detective mood, a pairing that makes absolutely no sense but completely works.
Green, the comic artist and author, freelance illustrator and aspiring filmmaker behind this madcap creative style, had a fascination with art and illustration and storytelling ever since she was young, growing up in Columbus.
“I’ve always had a knack for art. I knew that I couldn’t ignore my artistic passion. Even back then, I knew, I gotta keep working on this,” Green said. “I really fell in love with storytelling and character design. Watching movies, it was always the creative process behind it that fascinated me. I always wondered, how did they make this scene, what did they do, how did they create the characters, and I would imagine what I would do differently.”
She began thinking up ways to use her artistic skill to tell her own stories by combining deep research, hours and hours of practice, and the creation and fusing of a unique narrative and execution into something totally different. “I want to tell my own story and put my own spin about subjects and topics that are important to me,” she said. “You have the front story of what everyone sees, and there’s always that deeper story and meaning that is a little extra. That’s with all my stories and characters.”
She’s been developing her style for years, and its one-of-a-kindness is something she is very proud of. She studies other artists and practices different ways of making characters expressive and vivid. She cites her biggest influences as old cheesy 80s and 90s action movies, with the sometimes-mindless violence and mayhem replaced with a bit more nuance and characterization.
“My style is definitely something I want to stand out. I love the detail of realism that realistic art style can bring, whether it’s the tension in the face you can create with muscle lines in different positions, or other things, I love seeing that in art. At the same time, I love the exaggerated, super-stylized elements that cartoonishness can bring. Do I want to go super realistic and detailed or super exaggerated and stylized? Why not both? I try to push myself to have a good balance of believable realism, but also having fun exaggerations to the characters.”
Green does a lot of work on individual illustrations, paintings and drawings, but has also created two ongoing comics with original conceptions and characters. One, “DEAgents,” is a neo-punk-noir thriller about three roguish agents tackling crime and wrestling with morality in a gritty city. The other, “Quest for the Right Hand,” is her upcoming work that imagines a medieval world where dinosaurs never went extinct.
“There was this whole interesting way that people lived, this bright, beautiful, colorful medieval world. A lot of the way that era has been depicted is in greys and browns. I want to see some cool colors, with some cool, scientifically accurate dinosaurs. Some of them are scary monsters, some could maybe be used in the military. Some could be used as trades or marks of status. I just want to play with those ideas,” she said. “I research dinosaur morphology, I research medieval culture in this time period. It’s really interesting, and I’m really excited to learn about it all.”
One of Green’s main goals for the future, however, is to break into film, the medium that inspired her when she was a child. She is about to graduate from the Georgia Film Academy and has hopes of being a director.
“I have done storyboarding for a short film and several commercials,” she said. “I know I can bring versatility to whatever job I need to do. I can do storyboarding, I can do costume and character design, I can do fabrication, I can do painting, I can do all those things. I’ve actually worked on a little short script, and I would like to finish my first short film one day. The comics, to some extent, are basically storyboarding for future movies or shows that I’d like to do.”
With Georgia’s skyrocketing film and television presence, it’s a dream that may very well come true, and Columbus is poised to reap the benefits. If it does, Brittney Green is ready for them.
People interested in getting in touch with Green about projects or commissions can find her on Instagram at @brittknack_arts.
