Tara Hamilton is taking comics to a new world
One of Chattanooga’s best illustrators is pushing the boundaries of sequential art and digital media. In a relatively short time, Tara Hamilton has risen to the top of the indie comic world, and she’s just getting started.
Hamilton began drawing as a child, and continued throughout school where she attended UTC, earning a BFA in Painting & Drawing in 2009.
“I always just assumed that was what I was going to do. I went through the whole program—it helped me out scholastically, but it didn’t prepare me financially,” she explains. “I really honed in on my skills creating, but it was kind of in a vacuum, so I never really knew what to do after college. There was a professional prep course, but the professors rotated out so quickly that nobody got an actual program hammered out.”
After graduation, Hamilton moved South looking for better opportunities.
“I moved to Atlanta thinking I could get a graphic design job with my Drawing & Painting degree, and I got illustration work to get by, but I realized that if I had the right degree I could get a lot more jobs.” So she moved back to Chattanooga and earned a Graphic Design degree from UTC in 2015.
When it comes to her process, she likes to work on the edges.
“I make my illustration work in that vague line between concrete and abstract thinking—vague enough where you can insert any story in, but with just enough language there to tie you down. If there’s no text, then it’s all about facial expression.
“Story lines are what drew me to comics—when I was in high school, I did illustrations without any story line because I was afraid to make comics—I was afraid I wasn’t a good writer and I had trouble finding a writer to work with. It’s like a marriage, working with a writer in comics. There’s got to be a symbiosis, a passion.”
In 2008 she met the writer she would work with almost exclusively for the next decade—Ali Burke, a fellow UTC graduate. They began making comics, and their production company FineOK Press was born.
“When we started out as Tara Hamilton & Ali Burke, nobody seemed to care, but as soon as we had a proper name, things seemed to work out better,” she notes.
For years, Hamilton had tried to make a generic zombie comic, but when she met Burke, they decided to scrap the idea in favor of something more original. They settled on a post-apocalyptic story that fit her drawing style perfectly. The resulting comic series, “A/R/R/O”, continues to be a labor of love and major part of her life’s work.
“A/R/R/O” is a hopeful take on a post-apocalyptic story, focused on the process of rebuilding a country after it is completely devastated. The story is character-driven, with each being a person who has a reason to be rebuilding, having the motivation to leave their life and visit another country to help. Or, as Hamilton explains, “It’s like The Walking Dead meets Greenpeace.”
In many ways, Hamilton combines both the old and the new in creating her art. Her typical digital drawing is similar to traditional comic book art. It usually starts with photo references, and is drawn with a classic style where the basic forms are blocked out, erased and replaced with smoother lines, and inked—kind of like drawing a skeleton, and then covering it with muscles and skin. Digital media lends itself well to this process, enabling many layers of drawing that can easily be erased, moved around, and colored.
“The iPad and Apple Pencil is the closest to a pencil and paper that I have gotten in a long time—90 percent of what I do is in Photoshop, I’ve been working with it since the early editions,” she explains.
All of Hamilton’s comics are printed on high quality paper at Wonderpress, where she works as a printer. She just wrapped up a Kickstarter campaign for “A/R/R/O”, and is printing the second graphic novel in the series.
After that, she will be traveling to lots of indie comic conventions to advertise and distribute the books—MICE (Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo), CACE (Chicago Alternative Comics Expo), TCAF (Toronto Comics Arts Festival), VCAF (Vancouver Comics Arts Festival), and DINK (Denver Independent Comics & Arts Expo), to name just a few.
In September, Hamilton’s work will be exhibited at the Hunter Museum’s Biannual Show. She’s working on the next chapter of “A/R/R/O”, gearing up for 2019’s big conventions, and creating a new comic series that takes place in space.
See her work at arrocomic.com