Flatland stuff

There's some dust in the corners of this place, huh? Well, I've been busy.

Busy cleaning up my 2011 24 Hour Comic, Flatland.

I tend to use 24 Hour Comic Day as a way to force myself to focus, to drop everything else and just create for a while; I don't really care about finishing the pages, or inking them at all. What I end up with is a 24-page storyboard of a full comic - or a whole chapter of a full comic, as the case turned out to be with Fathoms.

I don't really have a plan when I start, except perhaps a few vague images and a character-design or two. I just put pen to paper and let my imagination roam to see what it comes up with. In 2010, it came up with wide open seas and clouds and mischievous wind-spirits. In 2011, it became deserts and birds and blood.

Here's the first page, as it turned up on the Day:

Regular and coloured pencil, crooked panels, scribbly art - this is barely more than a thumbnail, albeit a rather large one.

When I picked this back up and started polishing it, I used the original storyboard as reference, and re-drew each page with it as a guide:


Again, not the neatest piece of art - there's scribbles and guidelines and all sorts of stuff in there that didn't make it into the finished piece - but it's better than the storyboard.

I did all of the clean Flatland pages in Paint Tool Sai, because I really adore the neatness of its lineart tools and the almost vector-like sharpness you can achieve with it. I went over the scribbly digital sketches in pure black and white (which was quite challenging in parts - how do you draw something black set against a black background, without making it either invisible or silly-looking?) and then added red as the only colour-accent - as blood.

Because all stories, as Terry Pratchett once said, are sooner or later about blood.


You can see the finished page On Smackjeeves, where I'll be posting all 24 pages.

Sketchdump

Not much news on this front - I'm plugging away at my Comic Royale-submission, and not much else is happening; Fathoms pt. II went to print on Friday, and I'm expecting my copies some time this week.

The only big (-ish) news is that I've started Tweeting. :)


Inked panel from page 3. Dumbfounded faces are the funniest to draw.

When I'm not working on my comic, I'm playing Zelda, pretty much.


Some sketches done while watching BBC's Into The Wild:

More Comic Royale-stuff+sketchdump

Been a while since I updated this blog - but that's because I haven't really been doing anything sketchdump-worthy lately. It's been comics and posters and more comics and more comics.

But finally, I've got enough stuff to warrant a post. Let's start with the CR-comic stuff:


The sketch for the second page of my comic - everything is subject to change up to the moment I submit it, but this is pretty much what I've got in mind. Except, you know, properly inked, with grey tones and dialogue and stuff.

Swedish intermission: på tal om Comic Royale - är det nån som vet när deadlinen är? Vem fan ska man lämna in till? Jag har mailat info@comicroyale, men har inte fått något svar överhuvudtaget. D:


Nila Thane - actiongirl! She'd totally give Indiana Jones a run for his money.


Old envelopes are perfect for scribbling on.


Sketchdump:

Concepts for my Comic Royale submission

First post of 2012, and it's exactly what it says on the label! I'm finishing up Fathoms pt. 2 (only cover and title page to go!), and so I've started working on my submission for Comic Royale #6.

It's a steampunk-action-adventure thing, with a ruined temple and some steampunk-airship-pirate people.


Quick concept sketch of the temple entrance


Working on the look of the statues inside the temple - these are still subject to change.


Detail of a painting I'm working on right now; the final is going to be in colour.

Comic WIPS

Here's a work-in-progress image of one of the pages I'm currently working on:

Last panel is obviously unfinished, and there's some details missing in the other panels (as well as some digital editing needed in the first panel; I'm not entirely happy with the cross-hatching).

Brush-pens are fun.

Sketch-dumpery

So. Yeah. Stuff I've done lately.


Ink-tests for my comic for the parts that take place under water. A bit scribbly and half-assed, but I'm sort of getting to where I want to be with them.


Also, lighthouse-girl - who still needs a name. I think I'll have to consult my atlas to hunt for appropriately sea-worthy names.


And last but not least - Ichinose, looking typically grouchy. It's his ground state of being.

Hesitant progress is being made

I'm plugging along on A Thousand Miles of Wind, and it's going quite well. I am behind on my planned schedule, because of family trouble and a persistent and quite incapacitating neck-ache that strikes me at odd intervals - and since I much prefer a whole neck to a whole finished project, I've been forced to slow down.

But I'm not defeated yet!

Here's the first inked page of the comic - it's been scanned in two pieces, because it's drawn in A3-size and I only have an A4 scanner, so there's a strange break right in the middle of the image, right across the stairs, but ignore that part; when I scan this for real, it'll be on my school's A3-scanner.



This took me.... about five-six hours to ink properly, I guess? The leaves didn't take as much time as I feared they would, but it was still slow going, considering the architecture in general, and the stairs in particular.

A Thousand Miles of Wind - bits and bobs

Interesting fact of the day: storyboarding eats my brain.

It is the most important part of comic-creation, and while it might not be as time-consuming as actually drawing the pages, it is hard work - it tends to leave me feeling as if I've turned my brain inside out.

So why don't I show you a bit of what A Thousand Miles of Wind looks like right now? Here's the storyboard for pages three and four:


Usually, I write a plot-summary first, and then I write a proper script, then I do the storyboard, and then finally I revise the script to fit the storyboard - with A Thousand Miles of Wind, I did my plot-summary the usual way, but I've storyboarded and written the script at the same time, piecing everything together as I go along.

... It's all very scribbly on the page, but it's enough for me to know what's going to go in each panel and what it's going to look like.

Speaking of what goes in the panels, here are some background characters - only the old lady has any lines in the script - four of them, I think.



I just wrapped up the entire storyboard for the comic - it ended up being thirty-two pages, two pages over my planned maximum limit, but I am pretty happy with it, all things considered.

Now comes the most work-intensive part - actually drawing the thing.

Tengu

First art post - yay!

So, A Thousand Miles of Wind is going to be the story of a young shinto priest named Toshiyuki, who accidentally gets into trouble with the local supernatural critters - the most important one being the tengu who lives on the same mountain.



I'm still kind of fiddling with the details of the tengu's design - adding things and subtracting things all the time - but I'm pretty happy with how he looks right now. He's a bit difficult to draw from the back, considering all of those feathery things on his head, but I'll get around to that.