My Attempts to Imitate Bryan Lee O'Malley's Style

Bryan Lee O'Malley - Visual Style

So Bryan Lee O'Malley's style consists of minimalist use of lines. He has a cartoony and goofy style that uses bold lines and colours. He often writes rather witty content, which is especially potent in the Scott Pilgrim series.

The image on the right is a frame from Seconds by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Notice the how defined each item is on the page in terms of its colouration and its look.

In this double page spread from Seconds we see the protagonist Katie within her restaurant. This is a character building page. We see that the restaurant is her pride and joy and that she is good at it. O'Malley makes this character seem smug to create witty content, the narrator says: "The food was star here. And the food was Katie's... so Katie was pretty much the star here."

What I particularly like about O'Malley's style the way he uses a slightly simplistic style to convey the narrative. There is nothing overly complex about it, it's not massively intricate and detailed but at the same time it shows so much. In addition his use of colour in his first graphic novel Lost at Sea is extremely minimal, he uses only three colours, white, dark blue and a peachy pink (see image on the left). I intend to experiment with my own work this way of using a limited colour palette as I feel is effectively expresses a feeling of isolation, which is a strong theme in Lost at Sea.