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!