Page eleven of the story I’m working on for Fulcrum Press & Jason Rodriguez’s Colonial Comics anthology. Â Another scene at Kahnawake. Â THIS was all I had for a “script:”
Eunice, about 15 years old, working in the fields, when she sees a handsome young warrior coming back from the hunt. Zing!
This would be the meeting between Eunice and her future husband. Â Eunice did marry a Mohawk man named Arosen, but how or when they met is pure speculation, so I speculated. Â I did some sketches in between caricatures at an event (ignore the silly childrens caricature border and that woman with the glasses):
Then the thumbnail (with bonus silly sketch and some numbers in the margin!):
As you can see, I decided to make this page / scene a bookend for the one on page 8. Two key moments in Eunice’s integration into the community/coming-of-age. I used an almost identical panel layout, with the large panels at top-left and lower-right demonstrating the “arc” of the page via Eunice’s change in attitude; and then the story being pushed along by a series of looks and glances in the smaller panels that take up the top-right and lower-left quarters of the page.
Also I had some problems with the way I drew Eunice in the first panel. Â She looked like she was tipping over. Â I just “straightened” her up with photoshop…
…see? Â (here’s the rough pencils/inks:) (with some of those sketches I did on the caricature sheet thrown in because I couldn’t do any better and why not?)
Oh, and I liked this little pencil sketch trying to get Eunice’s attitude in panel 4, so I just stuck it in the rough as well (before printing it out for light-boxing the final art).
Final line-art:
Final? Â Yeah, right! Â Seeing it now, I feel like Eunice’s head is too small in the last panel. Â I’m going to try and fix that digitally before I color it…
