Bonbon Voyage

This semester, I am Lead Artist for Gingerbread Games, a team of student artists.  Our game is Bonbon Voyage, a fairytale story of Siggy, a greedy little boy who abandons his chores and discovers a candy maze.  We're using the Unity engine to make the game, and, if all goes well, we will be able to publish to the web with Flash.

Of course I haven't forgotten about my comic book project, but it's relegated to the back burner while school is on.

Mad Science!

Okay.  So.  Fall semester was as deadly as predicted, and I spent most of winter break recovering.  That time also included a few experiments regarding how traditional lines and photoshop color can interact.  The intent was to preserve pencil lines, which can have more texture to them than ink.

Generally, scanners have a hard time picking up the subtler lines that pencils make, and this was my initial problem.  It's one everyone faces.  But I found a solution!  I reasoned that due to the exposure settings on my scanner (which I'm not sure I can change) the bright whiteness of standard printer/sketchbook paper may be what's drowning out the lighter pencil work.  So I tried drawing on light gray paper and scanning that.  It was a noticeable improvement.  Much more of the information was preserved.

Anyway, here's some pictures.

1.  Nwain.  Traditional: Pencil.  Digital: Ink and color.
Used gray paper.  The paper and pencils were color shifted in photoshop, using hue & saturation set to colorize.  The paper/pencil layer was then set to linear burn and moved on top of the painting layer.

 2.  The Margravine.  Traditional: Pencil and ink.  Digital: Color.
I like to ink traditionally.  It's fun.  So I thought I'd try inking directly on a pencil sketch.  That wasn't fun.  It saved me about two seconds (the time it would take to grab a new sheet of paper and scoot over to the light table), and it cost me a bucket a sweat.  Not doing that again.

3.  Nameless Fire Sprite.  Traditional: Pencil and ink.  Digital: Color.
Here, I penciled on gray paper, got a fresh gray page and inked on that.  One problem with this particular gray paper is that it's not as transparent as regular printer paper.  That made inking difficult.  I could hardly see what I was doing.

4.  The next step will involve finding and testing various light weight toned papers.  I'll start with vellum, as soon as I figure out where I put it...

---

This picture is somewhat unrelated to the others.  It's inked traditionally and colored in photoshop.  I wanted to try out a new set of pen nibs.  They, at least, work well.

That's it for this entry.  Spring semester is fast approaching, and I'll be just as swamped as Fall.  See you around spring break!

-Terry

Back to Step 1

School has, as predicted, left me with very little time to work on Nwain.  However, this could be a good thing.

I've been discussing the plot with the boyfriend, and he pointed out that I was trying to fit the story into too small a space.  "Just tell your story, use as many pages as it takes," he said.  I was skeptical; I figured adding a bunch of pages would multiply the amount of work I'd have to do as an artist.  I want to work efficiently so I can actually complete this project.  The next day--the very next day!--my Storyboards teacher gave us a handout, with this written on it:

You cannot tell a full hero's journey in a short!  Do so at your peril.

 I'm beginning to think this is sound advice.  (By the way, that is the exact wording.  I don't think it's an exaggeration.)  I trust this advice.  I also know I want to write a full hero's journey.  I now know I can't do that in 22 pages.  So there we have it.  Nwain will have to be longer.  It goes against one of my original goals, but I can accept that.  It helps that I don't have a deadline for this thing.  It'll be finished when it's finished.  Probably in a few years.

Doodles have been cropping up in my notebooks and scrap papers.  There's quite a cast of characters, and it'll be good to have more room to get to know them.  I'll also have to work hard on visually designing a few.  Nwain's competition in the tournament, "Fire Sprite Girl" and "Defender Guy" (both unnamed as of yet), will need particular attention, lest they get stuck in the Mire of Miserable Cliches.  Hmm, maybe that can be a place in the Dreamworld.  The Mire of Miserable Cliches.  Full of depressed ninjas.

Okay, that's it.  I kept my promise!  It's only been two months since my last blog entry.  Hot dang.  See you around Turkey Day, maybe.

Thumbnailing Nwain

Despite 15 weeks of my summer being devoted to school, I have made some progress on Nwain.

I cut an unnecessary complication from the plot--a bout with monsters at the end that was in no way connected to the main storyline.  But!  We can't have a fantasy adventure without monsters, so never fear, there will still be a slathering demonic critter of some sort.  I simply can't sit by and let a monster go undesigned.  It'll just be more integrated with the story this way.

Now with the plot more settled in my head, I'm skipping on writing a full script for now.  I can envision the scenes and roughly what needs to happen in each.  I will write out a plan for what needs to happen on each page, so I can keep the number of pages at 22.  (I feel a deep need to be strict about that arbitrary number, even though this is a personal project and in all likelihood will never be picked up by a big comics publisher.  I don't have to play by their rules, but eh.  I'll take the challenge--ultimately, it means fewer pages to draw, which means I might actually finish this thing.)

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  So, I'm moving on straight to roughing out page layouts.  That helps me determine the rhythm of the panels, and that will help me write the dialogue.  I'm finding that, unlike animation, where dialogue has to be written and recorded before the drawing gets going, comics don't give a nit about lipsyncing.  I can draw and write nearly simultaneously, with pictures informing what I can do with the words, and vice versa.  It's pretty cool, and I'm having a blast doing it.


The other day, I used my mom's iPad to show Nwain pictures to people at Bonsai (a sushi place I've gone to since kidhood).  It seemed to hit a chord with some people, and one cool lady picked up on the Elfquest influences straight away.  I love Elfquest, so that made me really happy.  I suppose other strong influences would include Samurai Jack by Genndy Tartakovski and the Sandman by Neil Gaiman.

At anyrate.  I want to have the rough layouts done before school.  Hopefully I can sneak the first draft under a few noses and get some critique before moving on to the penciling stage.

That's it for this round!  Hopefully my next blogger post will be sooner than three months from now.

Nwain, My Comic Book Project

I'm starting a project for fun that I'm assuming will take quite a while to complete.  So I've been spreading my tentacles and touching base with my blogs (all of which I hardly maintain).  Just want to alert anyone who may be interested in following its progress.

I'm going to make a single-issue comic book, 22 pages long (the standard for comics), and make it available in print on actual paper.  I'll be writing, penciling, inking, coloring and lettering the whole thing.  Since I'm doing this in my minimal free time, I expect it to take a year at the least.  I will continue updating my blogs about its progress, though some will contain less information than others.  Blogspot seems most amenable to posts with lots of words, so I'll be using this space to explain what it is I am supposedly thinking.

First, I should tell you that this won't be a webcomic.  To try to be consistent with the art, I'll be drawing this thing non-linearly.  That is, I won't draw page 1 and then page 2 and page 3 after that.  I'll draw page 1, a page in the middle, and the last page, and then I'll work my way out from the important points.  It'll be like animating pose-to-pose instead of straight ahead--get the important pages done first, then handle the inbetweeny stuff.  So that precludes regular updates of actual pages, but once I'm done I will put the full book online so people can actually read it.


While on the subject of drawing, I have a clear idea of the direction I want to go with the art, and that's honestly the main reason I'm doing this.  I've been inspired lately by turn-of-the-century (or turn-of-the-last-century, really) illustrators like Rakham and Kay Neilson.  There's a web gallery on nocloo.com full of that stuff.  I'm also a fan of the modern day artist known as Bluefooted (see her(?)  deviantart gallery).  I'm sure I won't be the first, but I'd like to try this coloring/illustration style in a comic book format.


<--- Here, I tried roughly emulating bluefooted's method - draw and ink on paper, and color digitally.  A higher resolution version is on my deviant art.

This is just a test of the picture-making method to see if I could get something like what I want.  The actual drawing of actual pages is quite a while off yet.  I have to write the script first!



The story is that of Nwain, a reserved, bookish knight who quests through dreamland to follow a star.  She sees strange landscapes, meets odd people, and fights monsters along the way.  Sometimes, she finds places where she would rather like to settle, but her strict adherence to her quest usually prevents it.

Her requisite trusty steed, Sceadwian, is not a horse, but a bizarre composite animal with wolf and deer traits.  As this is dreamland, the creature shapeshifts--sometimes it's more like a wolf, sometimes more like a stag, but never a human.  It's slightly sentient, but its still a wild animal dominated by its instincts.  Sometimes, Sceadwian will go against the reigns and drag Nwain off track.  They have a sort of love-hate relationship.

I've got more specifics for the actual plot, but I don't want to spoil all of that just yet.  Mostly, I have to refine the ideas and get that darned script written.

Tally ho,
Terry

First Post

Hello.  My hair is brown, and so is my blog.