Friday, May 31, 2013

Creating a Green Asphalt Comic Page

Even though I'm still plugging away at it, I'd like to share some of my thoughts on developing my own personal comic with a page that went through a rather radical change from it's creation and finalization.

So here's the initial sketch. Fist off this sketch shows one of the big no-no's that I tried to avoid from the very beginning of my comic that being that panel 3 is offset from the line that panel 2 is. Not to mention I felt the last panel is very bland and not particularly interesting visually or from a narrative standpoint.


Ok so here is the newer sketch after a bit of thought in between gigs. I felt the first panel was perfectly fine but made a major overhaul on the other panels, by combing panels 2 and 3 I felt it made a stronger narrative and was overall more pleasing to the eye. This also allowed for a slightly larger size for panel 3. By changing from a closeup to a longshot of Lucky walking away I felt it emphasized the relative smallness of Lucky and the moodiness of the town.

Now I that I have this set, I'm basically on autopilot for the inking process. The only step inbetween these to note is that I slap a simple perspective grid over the last panel to ensure that everything looks correct. Unfortunately the building on the right, while nice compositionally didn't make a lick of sense so that had to be altered.
And a few more finishing touches. It's done.





With Green Asphalt there's a large emphasis on keeping my backgrounds looking nice. I feel that it's just as important as the characters. And I think I might share my thoughts on developing characters with my next post.



Character Designing Peppamint

Since I got a lot of positive feedback about the paintings I did of the Robo-shark Kid and Peppamint I'm going to show my process for painting Peppamint.

My initial stage was to come up with an interesting shape and I started by shaping out what would ultimately become her hat. After having a face that I found appealing, my next step was to come up with a simple but interesting outfit the sort of fit with the overall design. Once all that was in place I considered the sketch phase done.




With the sketch out of the way, I wanted to have a nice "clean" look to the finished piece so I decided to ink the picture. My preferred method is to do my inking in Paint Tool SAI with the Pixel Brush for an extra clean look.

Now with the inking finished I got to work laying out the flat colors. My goal was to use a lot of bright and vibrant colors that I don't normally use, this one especially. Again I laid out my flats with the pixel brush to make it easier to fill large spaces of color with the paint bucket.





Now that I finished this, I went to the rendering phase, which is the most fun part of this after the sketch. For this step, I actually take the work into photoshop which I feel give me a bit more control over my brushes with painting. With all the careful planning on the previous 2 steps, this part goes by very quickly. Also, after working on the rendering, I felt that the bunny she's holding was too similar in color scheme so that was changed by selecting his colors and using color balance.
And here is the finished result.

I hope this helps share some of the help on the matter of my coloring process. Every time I paint I always learn something new.