Posts Tagged ‘sketch’
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Here are some images that I cut from issue #4 of December Sun. I’ll try to post a bunch of these over the week, if for no other reason than the fact that they are just taking up space on my hard drive.
Two panels today were some experimentation that I did on newsprint. I used a LOT of newsprint paper in college, as its an excellent medium for charcoal and conte chalk. In terms of sequential comic pages, though, I wasn’t crazy about it. Here are some panels from a page I started and quickly lost interest in.
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I wanted to share this page from one of my old notebooks. I have two systems that I use to creating notebooks of December Sun ideas. Some are just straight written text, with few random illustrations. I’ve got quite a few notebooks stacked around that describe characters, story ideas and concepts, locations, etc. Then some notebooks are all built around visuals and sequential narrative. The page included here is an example: with battles and fight scenes, I draw most all of these out with minimal dialog in notebooks, to get an idea of pacing and breakdown of how the scenes will unfold.
In it’s most elemental form, these visual notebooks are the kind of thing that I used to draw when I was young, but the creation process was a lot different: back then, I drew first and just let the story unfold from the artwork. It was a much more interesting process, but the stories often left something to be desired.
These days though, time is so limited that I often just resort to keeping notebooks of written ideas, and I’ll just down themes and ideas that I want to pursue. I’ve also noticed that, even if I write out an elaborate path in some of these notebooks, whether or not I use the ideas if a completely different matter. I was taking the train home from Chicago once, about 5 years ago, and I had written out a detailed tapestry of story ideas that would take place. But looking back now, I skipped most of the ideas, or bypassed them for a future run (I had an arc of stories set to a tight 12-issue run, but I gave that idea up.)
Anyhow, just rambling about some of the creation process.
Here is an example of a page from December Sun: I basically start with a very rough pencil breakdown and then ink everything. Where I can be lazy and finish the image with Photoshop, I do so, and make marks/notations of where to make the changes.
Notice above my stupidity with panel #4: John’s left is to the window, yet there is the waitress pouring coffee? Yes, Photoshop is a wonderful thing for dummies like me.
Some other notes about this page:
- Panel #1 features a lot of wax pencil for the street texture. I like the effect, but I’m probably going to stick with half-tones in the future. Also note the poorly-drawn car: I actually found an old french curve tool that I used for that. The sun was a dime that I traced. Yeah, I’m cheap.
- I leave notes for myself in the margins, knowing that I will cut these later out of the picture during digital cleanup, but every now and then, I leave notes for myself that don’t make any sense, or that I forgot what I took the note for. For instance, to the right of panel #1, I have no idea what “crazy ink on windows” means.
- To the far right, you can also see a sketch of a costume idea that will appear in issue #5. Stay tuned!
- Panel #3 – yes, I can’t draw cars, and yes, my skills with perspective are a little bit off.
Anyhow, that’s about it. I’d take this, scan it, clean it up, adjust the contrast, enlarge/crop where needed, then once sized right, I add dialog, aiming to place dialog strategically in places in the panel where I don’t like the artwork. Seriously, I’ve covered a lot of bad art through these issues with a well-placed dialog balloon.
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