So lately I've been doing a lot of character sketches but for the most part they've just been model sheety: boring with no backgrounds or anything like that. Over the last week I decided to work more on placing my characters into their environment and seeing how it works out. The opening to my first bit of comic takes place in a jungle so I figured I should start there. This was my first attempt. It wasn't until I began to color it in that I realized I hated it. Yes it was dense and had jungly plants in it but there was something missing I couldn't place my finger on. I also hated the colors I chose for the dinosaurs.
My second attempt, I decided to have the characters in a more engaging pose. obviously I also added a speech bubble. However the weak poses and speech bubbles fail to cover up a jungle that is still horribly wrong and for awhile I couldn't figure out why.
To ease my mind I drew this, it's not really related to this blog post's story line so skip ahead and come back later.
After thinking about it intensely for a few days I turned to two of the artists I admire most and looked at their work. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes, and more importantly for the purposes of my comic Warwick John Cadwell's Jungle which you can see on his flicker here:
http://drawn.ca/archive/warwick-cadwells-100-panel-gungle/ . Right now Mr. Cadwell is my favorite artist on the planet and it's because of the way he manages density, shape, detail, figures, focal points, white space, space in general; his characters poses; the mood of his scenses, ah just everything I think he's golden. So anyway while looking at his work I saw that mine was seriously lacking a sense of depth, space, and shape and that my characters poses were hardly engaging (that I picked up from both WC and Watterson), so anyway I took a shot at what I wanted to be my opening page to my short comic. I will have to do it again because this was drawn in my sketchbook and not on comic book paper. (I took a picture of this instead of scanning it in so it's a little blurry. When I scan it it'll have to be in pieces so I figured I'd finish it first before I tackle that headache):
I was very very happy with this. You can see I borrowed alot of elements that Cadwell uses in his working and tried as much as possible to blend it in with my own work. As I continue to practice I hope they mesh more. I am currently in the process of adding line weight. I cannot wait to color it in.
Step 2: Put the black lines on a separate layer and color in the lines on various different layers.
Step 3: Select the black lines using channel select and color in the lines on separate layers:
Step 4: Over lay watercolor wash textures I've made and scanned in on various layers
Step 5: Shade in the flats on all the various flat layers.
and that's how I color in each of my spreads and why it takes so so long. Each page ends up having somewhere around 30-60 layers. fun fun fun. I'm about half way done on the inner pages and will have to complete the cover and some spot illustrations after. just keep swimming.
