Sketch Two: Jaimie

This is a sketch of the youngest brother from the story.  His name is Jaimie.

This is pretty close to my vision of Jaimie with one crucial exception.  Jaimie is a good bit younger and skinnier than what we see here...so there is still some more work to do.

We got two more main characters sketches in the story that I can show...and one that I can't (bwa ha ha ha!).  Coming Soon...

Take Two: Sketch One

Here is a sketch of the Father from Softly Tenderly story.

I'm not completely satisfied with this one , but it's a start. He has the hair I was trying to achieve, but his facial features are a little off from what I was aiming for. His demeanor is correct and generally his body shape, but it definitely needs fine tuning.

There are more character sketches coming soon.

Not Necessarily Josh and Jesse...

This isn't something that Josh and I have done together, but it is at least comics and indie comics related. I've done a review of H.O.P.E. Tales of the Nuclear Family on my comics art blog, Wind of the Gods. Please check it out here and support these other aspiring creators.

The Return

My move is complete now and I almost have everything set up in my new place.  What a long few months it has been!  I hope that everyone will take a few minutes to go check out the current Hallowscream issue.  :-)  Now that I am getting settled in, watch for fresh new posts by the beginning of the year as the wheels of progress begin moving again. (fingers crossed)

week 7: Spoken Too Soon...

Due to my spiraling financial situation, I am going to have to move.  It turns my stomach to say this, but I am not going to finish Softly Tenderly for this years Hallowscream issue.

I'm not stopping my work, the story will be finished, just nowhere near as soon as I would like.  Now just isn't the time I guess.  This whole year my life has been stair stepping down into the mud, but since July it has been an extra slippery patch.  I've been working triage as much as I can, but it has become obvious that there will be no forward progress for me this year when I cannot even hold my ground.  So it goes...

I won't be stopping by any means, but I suspect that it will be a month or more before I have anything new to report.  I may be overestimating there.  I'm going to hold off on anymore promises.  I no longer no what my future holds.  I hate moving and I hate for my personal rituals to be disrupted.  There is no way around it though.  Check back in a month or three and hopefully I will have positive news.

Week 6: Just when I thought...

I had planned this post to be a regret that I was going to be unable to complete Softly Tenderly in time for the Hallowscream, but I discovered this week that the final deadline is October 23rd.  This changes things a bit.  I've been thrown WAY off track with the tumultuous events of this past summer and have struggled to get back to where I need to be.  This adds a good bit of fuel to my fire.  There is indeed hope.  :-)

Week 5: Time, Perspective, and Repetition

I'm still working on overcoming my Perspective issues.  However on the way I've discovered a few things about the story.  I realize now that the sketching and layout portion of the story needs a good bit of time to be completed and effective.

This is the third time I've discovered more effective ways of telling the story.  There is one page where I added a superfluous panel and one page where I was ready to add a complex and dramatic element that is completely uneeded and stylistically off base with the rest of the story.  If I had rushed through on these, I would have ended up with weak pages on both accounts.  Food for thought on that one.  However by the same token, I could waste a million years rethinking all my work and never get anything accomplished.  So it's a balancing act.

Here are some scans of the perspective studies for page one. First a small sketch and then the page rough.  Although not quite as complete as I would like.  Perspective and I still aren't really on speaking terms.  It's never really been my strong suit and it is a very necessary component to comics art...so I'm working on it.  I want it to be perfect, but that is kind of impossible as I am learning the process.  So I am kind of pushing against myself here.  I know that it will work itself out over time.  It is just a matter of putting my nose to the grindstone with it.  This is one of those things that only expereince will speed up the process.  Repetition, mmmmm, my favorite. 

Week 4: (Lack of) Perspective

This week has been rough.  The honeymoon is over.  Perspective drawing is kicking my butt.  It has been awhile since I've done any heavy perspective drawing and this has definitely become a hurdle.  I feel like I've drawn the same page a million times.  There are bits of crumpled sketch paper all about my studio.  I have walked away many times this week shaking my fist at the page vowing revenge.  I hope that by next week I will something more positive to offer.  Right now I am hating my pencils, my paper, and myself.  Grrrrr.

Week 3: People, Places, and Things - The Nature of Character

Although technically character sketches should have occurred at the beginning of the process, I held off because I wanted to get a head on the page compositions, and I discovered a good bit about the characters through the small sketches of the page thumbnails. I almost feel like I was viewing the characters from far away and began getting closer to them as I worked on the story more and more.

There are five primary characters in the story and a small group of bystanders in one scene.  It has been awhile since I've drawn portrait style images of characters so this took some warming up.  I have some fairly specific reference material I'm working from so it was a little disappointing with the first round of sketches because they looked nothing like my goal.  I know that in the end it is the final images that count, but it is a bit disheartening when you can't get what's in your head to look anything like what you draw.  Every road has speed bumps or pot holes though.  This is the part of the thumbnail and rough sketch process that always slowed me down before.  Literally - back to the drawing board!  ha.

Also during this process I sketched the house from the story as well as a large exterior environment where an important scene occurs.  I guess that makes for seven characters - ish. For the house I did an elevation study as well as an interior layout.  Mind you, my skills do not lie in interior design so both of these were fairly rough.  However it helped me to consider these because two scenes take place in the house in the same room area.  Laying out the house's floorplan on graph paper helped me to better determine where my "camera" angle would be for each of the scenes.

In the middle of the character studies and while I was drawing the page thumbnails I learned that a period of loose sketching or doodling helps my final product dramatically.  When I was working on the page thumbnails, I kind of did them all simultaneously and by the end the pages I drew were much sharper and clearer than the first pages.  Now I am trying to include about 30-45 minutes of sketching before I get to any serious drawing.  Not that sketching isn't serious drawing.  :-I   I'll let you know how all that turns out.

Week 2: Softly Tenderly in Miniature

This week I took the page thumbnails I drew and made them into a miniature comic book.

I ran over the thumbnail sketches of the pages with a sharpie to define the blacks and clarify the page compositions.  I cut them all out to proportional page size and taped them to other small sheets so that they could be double sided.  Finally, I stapled the whole mess together to create a palm-sized version of the finished story.  Voila - Mini Comic!!!

I created a mini comic for two reasons.   First, the thumbnails had several corrections that needed to happen among the pages.  Several panels needed to be moved from one page to the next.  Secondly, this is very inspiring to me because now here in the palm of my hand is a miniature version of the comic!  (tiny yay!)  This gives me the opportunity as well to look over the pages to see if there are any problems with story flow and scene transition. 

Doing this brought two issues to my attention.  The first is early in the story where a segue indicates a time change.  Seeing it laid out in the miniature format let me consider splitting the page in two and making the segue a page turn.   If the final product were a complete book, this would not have been an option as the story is already at eight pages and the finished page count would need to be a variable of four.  Because the book is going into an anthology, another page is a definite possibility.  So I will be breaking that page up and presenting it to Josh to see what he thinks.  This will also give me a little more space to focus on the scene before the segue and give a stronger emotional impact.

The second issue was on a single page where several panels had been moved and had left a good bit of space.  Upon seeing this in the thumbnail comic, I realized that with the extra space, I could add some thematic elements to the page to heighten the emotional impact of the page.  This may take the form of a background element beyond the panels.  More sketching and revision. 

speaking of...I also began detailed character sketches this week.  I only finished one of the characters so I won’t go into it too much.  I’ll save that for next week after I have more work done.  See you in seven!

Week 1: The Best Laid Plans of Mice and...SPROING!

It is amazing how completely derailed you can be by the structure of your life being disrupted. My plans for weekly posts here on Death By Comics became seriously waylaid this past week when my laptop (my only internet connection) went wonky and died. My logic card and my hard drive are dead. The nice guys at the istore are trying to get the data off of it as I type. Wish me luck. I will try to stick to my original plan for scheduled posting, but I’m making no promises right now. This year is officially being filed under super. crappiest. ever.

My laptop dying has brought ALL plans to a screeching halt. Until I can replace my laptop, I will be posting from the computers at my local library. They offer computer use for one hour at a time. I’m trying to prepare my posts at home so that there is very little I have to do at the library and can simply cut and paste. Hopefully this will work out until I can get a new laptop.

As for my work on Softly Tenderly, things proceed slowly. Part of the monkey wrench of this past week’s mess is that my copy of the script and all of my reference material for Softly Tenderly was on my Laptop. Yeah. I know. There has been lots of screaming and gnashing of teeth. So I’m on hold for that until I hear back from the istore. Wish me more luck. :-O

These first few posts are going to be fudging a bit because I've already been working on things and I'm a bit more ahead than starting from scratch. I'm sure I'll catch up quick though.  My original title for this post was The Revelation of Thumbnails, but that has been usurped by my poor dead laptop.  Anyone who knows anything about comic production is going to be laughing at me after this post, but I have to be honest. 

My first step in the process was to read Josh's script and examine all the major visuals. I made a list of all the characters, places, buildings, objects, literally anything prominent in the story that I would need specific reference for. Then I did an exhaustive Google search to find visuals for said reference. To help me keep it all organized, I saved the files into different folders indicating what element of the story it was. Ten years ago I was clipping lots of images from magazines and making copies from books for my image library. Now it all fits in a convenient folder on my computer...my poor dead computer. 

During this process I also looked closely at the pacing of the story. I examined the dramatic elements and how best to accentuate those moments to heighten the emotions of the story. Josh has been kind enough to give me the creative license to change some of pacing and beats in the story to add effect in different areas. Softly Tenderly began as a seven page story but is ending up with eight pages due to some shifting and additions. This point is also where I drew out my thumbnail sketches.

I drew a proportionate size rectangle that is about one-fifth the size that the finished page will be. Then I reread the page description to get the action in my head once again. I sketched the panels in to the small rectangle and scribbled in a small rough of the planned images. I drew multiples of these rectangles on an 11x17 sheet so I could work on more than one page at a time and make sure that the pacing would flow from page to page. Also as I went, if I had an idea for the finished image, I would scribble notes outside the thumbnail sketch with arrows pointing to the appropriate element that needed changing or accentuating. I made various notes to help remind me of elements that needed to be present as I moved to the next stage of rough drafts. If the page composition wasn't working out, sometimes I would abandon a thumbnail sketch and start from scratch with a new thumbnail.

I never really quite understood doing thumbnail sketches.  My brain got it, but heart was never into it.  I'd tried time and again to make the thumbnails happen, but was never able to do it.  For years, I've made page after page of half finished stories and art. I would get most of the way into a page and run into a problem that would require me to redraw the entire page. It made my art process very frustrating.  With Cast Off and Softly Tenderly, I've dedicated myself to doing all the steps in the process so that I can truly experience creating a comic book. So I pushed and pushed myself and made the thumbnails happen. Finally, I get it.

Thumbnails are for composition. They are tiny little sketches that are in the end...disposable. The goal with the thumbnail is to pre-think the page and resolve composition problems on a smaller scale so that when you arrive to the final 11x17 page you don't have to worry about composition at all. THAT is what thumbnails are for! With the thumbnail and the rough draft, you can eliminate composition issues and pacing problems before they ever become real issues. Sometimes I'm way too hardheaded for my own good. I acknowledged to myself long ago that I was a slow learner, but it still amazes me when something simple like this finally lands home.

Begin the Beguine!!!

Welcome to Death by Comics!

This is the production blog for the multiple comic book projects on which Josh Dean and I are collaborating. At this point in time there are two: Cast Off & Softly Tenderly. Josh is writing, I am drawing. Neither of us wants to spill the beans too much on either project until they are complete, but I will be posting some sketches and other tidbits to tease and delight along the way. It will be a fine line to walk, but hopefully in the process we can inform and record progress without diminishing the integrity of the final projects.

My personal goal is to use Death by Comics as a measure of my progress on our collaborations. I am requiring of myself that I post a minimum of once a week with updates on my progress with each project. This is to help keep my lazy butt in line as well as give us both a measure of the status of each project. This will be a forum for me to discuss the process of creating a comic book from the ground up and any issues or excitement we encounter along the way.

This is my first full comic book experience. I've inked other artists, I've penciled and inked unfinished works, I've even created a weekly comic strip during college, but my dream has always been to hold a completed comic that I've drawn. That brings me here to Death by Comics!

The first project we're working on is a horror story called Softly Tenderly. I won't go into details about the story, but I will let you know that, Gods willing, it will be appearing in this year's issue of Hallowscream. Hallowscream is an annually published online magazine celebrating the life and style of the magazine SCREAM from the 1980's. Check out Back from the Depths and Horrorcomics.org for more info.

The second project we're working on is called Cast Off. It will be a full length horror comic book. We haven't decided yet on the format the finished product will take. Josh has already finished the scripts for both projects, so now it is up to me to get off my bootie and make the art happen!

Next week I'll have more details about my progress on Softly Tenderly. I'll be focusing mainly on that project until it is published as it has the most urgent deadline. If I make any progress on Cast Off in the interim, I'll be sure to post the goods as well!

And this is Josh...I agree with and approve of everything my colleague has written above. I just wanted to add that Jesse is not only super-talented but a good friend/fellow comic geek. We met and bonded over our shared love of 80s Marvel books and the Lovecraft mythos. If you enjoy either of those things, hopefully you will find lots to enjoy in our productions. While the first two projects are horror-based, we plan to dabble in some other genres eventually. Thanks for reading...hope you enjoy!