Category: My Comics

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Comics process lunatic My Comics

“lunatic” process: 7-16-16

More photo reference and sketches, for the baby in the pram:

7-16 pram sketch4

I decided I don’t want to do more detailed sketches.  Getting a little burnt out on that, and also worrying about losing the spontanaeity if I expend too much effort drawing non-final images.  For this chapter, I think the next image I draw will be intended as final, not rough. Even though I’m still a little undecided on certain things, I think it’s better to work it out when I know it’s gonna count.  Just to avoid that feeling of not being able to capture what I liked about the rough version!

As far as the different media/effects I’ve been bouncing around with: Charcoal or conte crayon, acrylics, ink-splatter…. For now, I think my system is no system, just find the best medium or combination of media for each image/page.

Also, might be a bit of an interruption in this process… next week I need to spend time laying out the Shirley Jackson book, drawing an illustration, then Monday going away for a week.  So, probably not much progress on “Lunatic” until August….

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Comics process lunatic My Comics

“lunatic” process, 7-15-16

Sketches for page 3… actually more than just page 3.  There are 4-5 pages “cutting”  between the moon looking down, the baby in her pram looking up.

More messing around with different media and techniques… I liked the splattering, so maybe it’ll work in this image too:

pram 1

Well… no.  The spattering doesnt really make sense here.  And I don’t think I got the composition of this page right, either.

I switch to charcoal pencil:

pram 2

Ah,. yes.  this has the feel i want, and i like the expression.  Not right in all the details, but  it has the feel….  Let’s try that again:

pram 3

Nope.  Sometimes it’s so hard to reproduce what works well in a sketch.  This one just didn’t have it, so I abandoned it.  Maybe the angle on the pram was going to work a little better.  I call it a day.  I’ll be back.

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Comics process lunatic My Comics

“lunatic process,” 7-14-16

Trying different media.  Today, black, white and gray acrylics.

Moon studies.  The moon is one of the main characters in this story.

moon drawings 1 7-14

moon drawings 2 7-14

moon 1 moon 3

This is a study for what will be page 4.

moon over roof 7-14-16

I like it.

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Comics process lunatic My Comics

“lunatic” Process 7-13-16

I’ve been trying to figure out how I want this book to look.  I’ve come to the “conclusion” that what I am after is images with rich and interesting textures.  Maybe from conte, maybe some kind of paint.  Maybe using ink-spattering?  I’ve never done that before (well not since i was 16 or so), so I played around with it today:

7-13-16 p2 spatter jpg

I need to work on my toothbrush-flicking control.

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Comics process lunatic My Comics

“lunatic” process , 7-11-16

More photo reference:

The first chapter is seven pages.  Each a single image, so if I was drawing this as a regular panel-page comic, it would probably be one page, or maybe two.  I don’t have to thumbnail page layouts, but I realize I do have to think more than usual about spreads and page turns.  I thumbnailed the 7 pages out with that in mind (spoiler alert: this is totally illegible): thumbnail chapter 1

The chapters are mostly short like that, but longer toward the end.  If I was doing this as a standard comic, it might be about… 9-10 pages?  But in this format, maybe about 45-50 pages.

Besides that, I worked exclusively on sketches for page 2 today:

7-11-16 p2nursemaid 7-11-167-11-16 p2 27-11-16 p2 3

The composition probably more like that last one, though now that I see it, it looks a little cramped.  Maybe the one above is better.

Not sure yet about the style this will be drawn in.  For this page, I want the background to be looser, not to command too much attention away from the figures, and hopefully emphasize the pram over the nursemaid….

 

 

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Comics process lunatic My Comics

“lunatic” process, 7-8-16

One problem with this “blog the process” experiment is that I’m thinking about the blog too much as I’m working on the comic!  Oh well…. on the other hand it’s a motivation, to make sure I’m getting some work done so I’ll have something to post.

Today, gathering more photo research, like this:

Then some character sketching.  In this story I depict the character as an infant, as a girl of about 10, as a teenager, as a university student, in her 30s & 40s, so how to maintain some kind of continuity, which features are most characteristic?.7-8-16 chararcter scribbles

Thinking about style: how should I draw her eyes?  I’ve tended toward dots lately, but I think maybe i’ll draw full eyes this time.

7-7-16 character sketch

 

I went back to studies for the first page/first scene.

7-8-16 p1 rough

 

7-8-16

Second page study.  Not a bad sketch, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the style I’ll be drawing in, that’s my guess. Well, not much to do with it.  I’m intrigued by the idea of using conte or something like it for shading.

I’ve decided that this story is divided into 7 chapters, all fairly short, single scenes, though they gradually get longer.

chapters

Not terribly thrilled with my productivity today, but better than yesterday.  As long as I’m working on it, it’ll get done eventually…

 

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Comics process lunatic

“lunatic” process, 7-7-16

The thing about this experiment is, I have to post on the bad days as well as the good.  The bad days aren’t where I do bad work, it’s where other nonsense eats up my day and I do pathetically little.  So here we go.  One page of sketchbook scribbles, with a sketch of page 2 in the center and some very loose thumbnailing around it:

sketches 7-7-16

I meant to do character sketches, but that’ll have to be tomorrow.

I can make myself look a little better by also posting these studiesI did when I was messing around with acrylics last week:

acrylic sketches

See you tomorrow.

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Comics process lunatic Process & studies

“lunatic” process: July 6 2016

Real-time blogging on the process of my new project, still at very early stages.  The plan is one image per page.  I want to take each image seriously so it can hold its own, not being part of a sequential page layout.  Which means in some cases that I will have to do as much reference and sketching for a single image as… well a lot.

Such is the case with my first image.  It’s an “establishing shot” of a Victorian or Edwardian street scene, residential.  I gathered plenty of photo reference, thanks to Google (“Victorian Street” mostly):

victorian street residential 2

Continue reading ““lunatic” process: July 6 2016″
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Comics process lunatic Process & studies

New project: real-time process posts! (“Lunatic”)

In the past I’ve done process posts after-the-fact, when I was feeling good enough about how a particular project turned out, I’d go back and post the thumbnails, roughs, etc.

For my next project, I’ve decided to try and post the process as it goes along.  This is a little scary, since the project itself is somewhat experimental, and there may be frustrations along the way, which I’ll have to share as they come, with whoever may be reading the posts.  Still, I’m going to try.

This new project is a wordless comic, and I want to try it as a one-image-per-page story.  Maybe at about 5″ x 5″ or so, I’m not sure.  The title is “Lunatic.” It’s sort of like a children’s story, but not necessarily aimed at children.  I don’t think I’ll explain the story just yet.  I guess it’s got a bit of Victorian sci-fi to it.

The process started, actually, in late 2014, I think.  The story came to me, and I scribbled down a panel-by-panel outline in a sketchbook.  I’ve just now scanned the pages.  They get more scribbly as it moves along, and I can’t really decipher the last page too well myself.  Here they are:

first thumbnails 1

first thumbnails 2

first thumbnails 3first thumbnails 4

The story’s sort of rattled around in my head since then, and it seems now to have reached the front of the queue.  As I’ve re-told the story to myself I’ve made some conscious changes (like the gender of the protagonist, for instance).  But now, looking at these old thumbnails for the first time in a couple years, I can see that I’ve changed some things about the story in my mind without realizing.   Now I have to assess if I like the changes, or want to go back to the original ideas.   The face in the moon was something that I had forgotten – was that a good idea or not?  It has its charm, and I’m tempted to go back to it.

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Comics process My Comics

“My Experiment” or “Process: Ridiculous”

I recently completed drawing John Bell’s autobio/science story “My Experiment,” for the upcoming BCR anthology (and Kickstarter sensation), Boundless.

For this project I once again put into practice my philosophy of the comics-making process, which may be described as: make everything as complicated and torturous as possible and add as many steps as you can (or maybe that should be, “retrace your steps as many times as you can”).  Works for me!

Anyway, “My Experiment” is a six page story, and it started reasonably enough, with some roughs, which i also roughly ink:

roughs

…and I’m ready for final pencils.  (Just as a side note, this comic is drawn at actual print size, unlike the usual 1.5-to-2-times larger, so each drawn page has an image area of about 4.25 x 8 inches, which is kind of challenging.)

My problems started when I pencilled the first page in blue pencil, and just “experimentally” I inked it digitally in Photoshop:

p1-pencil-to-dig-inks-reduced

Hmmm… I liked the slickness of the digital inks, but on the whole I wasn’t satisfied.  I found the effect overall to be clean, yes, but also somewhat tight and finicky. So I resolved to ink the whole thing with a real brush and real ink.  Here’s page one:p1 v2 scan

…and I proceeded to pencil and ink the entire story that way.  Done, right?

Nooo… all the while it kept nagging at me, that the slick, clean digital look was somehow better suited for this story.  Maybe because it was about science and labs and stuff?   There were places where I wasn’t happy with my abiity to draw at this scale with a brush.  I just wasn’t sure, and I felt like the ONLY way to feel confident was, well, to re-ink the entire story digitally.

Which I did by taking each inked page, scanning, and converting to blue…

inks-to-blue-inks

…then adding another layer and digitally inking over the “blue pencils” created from my REAL inks:

blue-to-digital

Gimmicky gifs aside, I ended up with two versions of each page, a traditional ink and a digital ink, and I could make a side-by-side comparison:

p 1 comparison

Click on it to look close, and ask yourself: which did I choose?  Which would you choose?

….

…I couldn’t just choose, though, that would be far too simple.  I decided I overall liked the quality of the real-brush-and-ink lines, but there were some details I was much happier with in the digital. So, since the pages were identically composed (the digital being inked over the traditional) I could just go through and grab details I wanted from the digital and paste them in over the inks.  I hoped that I was being careful enough that the different styles (no, the different media wouldn’t clash.  The final result:

Bell-Mazur p1 final

Can you spot the digital paste-ins (hint: mostly faces).  Anyway, I repeated this ridiculously complicated process for all 6 pages — for some pages I liked the digital overall better, and pasted in some details from the real-inks!

And that, friends, is how we fly across the ocean!