Like most millennials, I love staring at floor plans on real estate websites and imagining “”owning”” a “”home.”” I can finally excuse the psychic damage: it turns out this is a really useful trait for a cartoonist to have.
The sharehouse is a recurring setting that represents authenticity and safety for my characters, so I need to know where everything is and where everything goes. This also helped me get a feel for all the housemates, who at this point existed as dot points only.
My notes called for:
Henry, Electra, Anira, Corey and Nassim live in the same sharehouse. Their ageing weatherboard house has a grungy, welcoming, down to earth vibe. The sharehouse is full of light and activity…sandwiched between a super fancy gentrified apartment block, where a house just like it was sold and knocked down, and a house owned by an old Italian couple with a bountiful garden.
The floorplan of the house shows that Henry is in the smallest room in what is technically a four bedroom house; he’s tucked away in the lowest rent room, a small once-storeroom at the back. The house overall hasn’t been redecorated or renovated at all since the 70s, and it’s full of mismatched second-hand furniture, fairy lights, milk crates as chairs, and pride flags. Almost all the furniture in this home was rescued out of hard rubbish on the side of the road.
I really did love sharehousing, but wow… I think my biggest challenge as an artist is going to be representing a realistic mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.