Comics, etc.

Flatland is getting on a bit in pages - all the way up to 10 now, so we're almost halfway! - so I thought I'd post the sketch for the latest page:


As I got further and further into drawing Flatland, my sketches started getting rougher and rougher; this is honestly what I inked on top of - no further sketched details added. I think that the simplicity of the backgrounds and the familiarity of the White Walker made it easier.

Otherwise, I need a pretty solid sketch to ink over, especially when I'm inking non-digitally - as I do with my ongoing fanzine-project, Fathoms of the Sky. In digital media, there's than handy "undo"-button, that my brushpens just don't have. :P

And by solid, I mean this is my storyboard for Fathoms III:


Compared to the ready-to-ink Flatland sketch above, the Fathoms-storyboard is at least twice as detailed - but it kind of needs to be, because it handles more visually complex stuff; more detailed backgrounds, characters with more complicated clothing, etc., etc.

I ink Fathoms mainly with a Pilot Pocket Brush Pen (Soft), with Staedtler pigment liners of varying width for panel-borders and tiny details. The first two parts will be available at the Stockholm International Comic Festival 2012, 28-29th of April, at at UppCon 2012.

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.

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.