Spill and chill with Sam Mills

“Everyone seems

to be drawing

straight

from the womb,

if you catch

my meaning”.

Sam Mills is a Illustration student currently studying in Norwich, he's currently in his third year and will soon go on to graduate. Over a skype call we discussed the various topics that has lead him to pursue a creative career and how he explores this through his work:

Why did you decide to work in a creative career?

“Mainly because when I started drawing I didn’t really start from an early age, I started when I was an early teenager. By that point I had been reading comic books since I was six and so I was invested in worlds created in narrative, driven through artwork and drawing in particular. I basically just started putting myself through drawing purely as an escape from school, which err, was horrendous and I hated with firm passion. I ended up scribbling ‘welcome to the machine’ on every notebook and thing I ever had so it was pretty much just an escape from trying work in an office really. It hit me around maybe year eight or nine that all school was, was preparation to work in a office forever and that idea was depressing and I don’t know it just doesn’t seem right to spend your entire life behind a desk typing facts and figures into a computer you know. So I guess that’s probably it”

What challenges have you faced so far?

“Going into something like drawing, illustration or narrative art from my position, starting drawing at around the age of fourteen is that I feel I’m constantly playing catch up to everyone else. Everyone seem to be drawing straight from the womb if you catch my meaning, I didn’t grown up drawing tons and so I don’t have natural instincts so I had to try and develop them as I go”

Describe your typical way of working?

“Freak out a lot. No, pretty much because I work mostly with narrative, and because I want to work with comic books you have to have all of the factors that you want to put into the work at hand before you start. You need to develop everything in your head or in notebooks or through sketches. It needs to be clear and precise in your head and then you can mess it all up when you’re drawing it later. So, counter productively as an artist I start everything with writing and then once I’ve got a solid idea of what I want to do, I move on to sketching, then structure, then scripts and so on and so forth. It’s an evolving process, picking up things as I go along so it changes. For instants back in foundation year (foundation diploma in art and design) I would just draw anything that sprung to mind or develop things on the fly. Where now I would take things into consideration all these factors I guess. But overall it can vary depending on the project really.”

What has been your most successful project and why?

“For foundation I made a book for my final project that contained three short stories, three comic books and a tons of advertisements that I put together myself. It was about sixty pages long and I was really happy with it just purely because it sort of expressed my mental state at the time which was very all over the place, it was probably most successful because it actually got finished. The problem with university project is that quite a lot of them you have a solid deadline so you know at some point you have to call it quits with you know? First two years I would find that with those projects I didn’t have any personal or emotional investment in them and so my foundation work was because I had all of the investment and drive to do it and I did it, I’m incredibly proud of that still”

What projects are you most interested in doing?

“Mostly I want to try and pursue my own narratives, so I have lots of notebooks with story ideas or ideas that I have or elements of social satire. So I guess its just pushing forward’s into my own ideas even further. I haven’t really done a solid plot really; everything I’ve done has been quite short all about five/six pages at most. I think the longest one is fourteen but that was very much done on the fly. The things I want to pursue now are larger works, more like a book length comics I guess”

If you could spend the day with any artist dead or alive, who would it be and why?

“Jack Kirby, he was a comic artist between the 1940s and the 1990s. In the sixties he created or co created depending on your controversial view the entire marvel universe. He had a style that was incredibly intensive, incredibly unique and pretty much set the foundation for action based comic books, either in America or throughout the world. It was him who actually inspired me to start drawing in the first place, I was reading his work on the fantastic four from the sixties and the anatomy wasn’t perfect but there’s a real sense of raw energy to it, a real expression to it that’s hard to grasp just purely through perfect drawing. His drawing wasn’t perfect but it was perfect for what it needed to be and it set the tone for everything at that time and pretty much onwards. The closest I got to meeting him, because he died in the nineties, was watching a video of him drawing and incredibly he doesn’t lay anything out, he starts in one corner and it just appears on the page its amazing. Well I would have loved to been able to meet him.”

What would be your ideal career in illustration?

“Just a place where I can write, draw and sell comic books. I haven’t really got a career path set. I don’t really know what I’m going to do; it’s scary at the moment. But I would like to be able to push into the comic industry, even though in Britain it seem like we’re on the edge of the world as far as comics go”

Is there a technique or method in working you have found useful and would recommend to other artists?

“The most useful thing I could tell people who aspire to draw comic books or to draw anything is that you don’t want to aim for perfection, I do tons of layouts so I can get all of the compositions right, I can get actions right, I can get gestures right, If I can. Its an on going process but anything I could recommend is actually just keep doing it, don’t get dishearten and pretty much pay attention when your laying stuff out I guess. The back up work is just as important as the work itself.”

Do you have any pictorial product or equipment you’ve found useful and would recommend?

“Well its an old favorite but Winsor and Newton’s Indian ink, I would describe it as my life if that wasn’t actually horrible but that’s the best thing you can use. As far as pens go Letraset’s are good for color and Kuretake brush pens, those are very good. When it comes to materials I know what I like pretty much, I like it to be direct so I purely mostly in ink I guess.”

Are you working on anything at the moment?

“Yeah I’m preparing my final project for university, as far as that goes its designed to be a forty-two or forty-four-page comic. Probably be forty-four as to turn something into a book it need to be devisable by four. It’s a long running story that I started developing in foundation this is supposed to be the first part of it. But I’m not quite sure where it is at the moment, I just handed in the project idea and the tutor still hasn’t gone through it. Hopefully they’ll let me do it if they don’t then ill have no idea what I’ll do. But yeah I’ve got something in the pipeline its called ‘Interstellar Bohemian’; it should be my fourth attempt at doing it. Hopefully this one will be the one.”

The Visual Spill would like to thank Sam Mills for taking the time to talk to us. There are links below to the products discussed today Next week we’re joined by Hannah Plane stay tuned!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Pens-Pencils-Writing-Supplies/Kuretake-Japanese-Bimoji-Fude-Brush-Manga-Calligraphy/B009DC65UU/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1486834226&sr=8-5&keywords=kuretake%20brush%20pen

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/1b3/Letraset-ProMarker-Set-No-1-Pack-Colours-Blender/B004V8L3RQ

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