Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Three page comic project pt 3: From thumbnails to final colors


Hello and welcome to my third and final post about my comic "Thistles"! Since I've already shared the final version of the comic, I thought it would be neat to step back and show you the process from the first thumbnails to the final colors. 

Making comics is a pretty involved undertaking with a lot of steps. The first one is the rough thumbnailing stage. After I knew what was going to happen in my story, I made a bunch of small, scrappy drawings to illustrate it. Since the drawings don't have to look good at this point, I drew on cheap paper with a ball point pen and then cut out and taped the thumbnails in sequential order.




As you can see, I tried to keep everything simple, with only the most basic details. (I probably could have made these even less detailed, actually.) I hadn't even figured out the character designs and all the panels and angles are pretty bland. But the whole story was at least in picture form.

After figuring out the characters and aesthetic of the comic, which you can read about here, I moved the final thumbnail/layout stage. This was the hardest part of the whole process for me. I had to decide on the composition and camera angles for each panel, as well and the relative sizes of the panels and roughly how they would fit together. I also put in some rough values, so I'd have an idea of where the shadows would be. 




Although it's still pretty rough, this is the first really indication of how the final comic would look. I did end up changing a few of the compositions and panels along the way, but the structure of the comic was really built here. 

With the final compositions fleshed out, it was time to start drawing! And since I accidentally made the final thumbnails fairly elaborate, I opted to use them as guides for the final drawings. I lightened them up, transferred them to separate pages via Photoshop, and redrew them with colored pencils. It was a pretty involved step, but ended up being the best course of action. 












After a few adjustments plus redrawing a panel or two, I was ready to start inking! I went over all the characters and foreground elements with a brush pen, then did all the background elements in a mechanical pen. The differing pen styles added depth to the compositions and created an interesting sense of contrast. I also designed and inked the title during this stage.













Once everything was inked, it was time for the final step, color! This was definitely the most exciting and frustrating part of the process. I decided to draw, ink, and paint on card stock, which is not really intended for watercolor. It took the paint ok, but I've officially decided never to use watercolor on it again!! Paper annoyances aside, adding color is the most magical stage (and probably my favorite); everything really comes to life at that point! ^_^













By now, the end was in sight and I was sprinting dragging myself to the finish line. After a final round of tweaking, I scanned all the painted pages, edited them in Photoshop, then arranged them into a final page format! 



And there you have it; how to make a comic in a bajillion complex steps!

If you made it to the end of this post, I officially award you a gold star for Champion Long Blog Post Reader! ;-P In all serious, thanks for sticking around to hear about the comic making process. Creating and sharing comics on the web has been a long time dream of mine and "Thistles" is my first real step into that world! ^_^ Thank you also for all your kind words, support, and encouragement! It really means so much to me! 

All the best!
Bethany



Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Three page comic project pt 2: "Thistles" (the full comic)


Hello again! As promised, today I'm sharing my finished comic! Enjoy! ^_^




Thanks for reading!
Bethany

Monday, July 30, 2018

Three page comic project pt 1: Visual Development


Hello everyone!
It's been awhile since I've written a blog post! I'm taking a bit of a break from blogging this year; actually I'd like to update my blog entirely and possibly get an official website, but that might take a while. Until then, I wanted to share a pretty significant project I just finished!

Back in May, I signed up for a really cool comic course call "Your Comic Journey", taught by the lovely Henrike Dijkstra. The object of the course was to create a short comic, from scratch to finish product, in 10 weeks. I'd been really discouraged about my past comic attempts and failures, so taking a course where the end result was an actual, finished comic was exactly what I needed. The next 10 weeks were tons of work, but a lot of fun too and I did, in fact, create and finish a short comic! *insert exuberant cheering and confetti throwing*

Since a lot of prep work went into making this final, three paged comic, I thought it would be cool to share some stuff from the process, starting with the early concepts, visual development, and character designs. Then I'll share the final comic itself, as well and the process from thumbnails to final inks and colors.

The first part of the course involved examining the topics, subjects, and visuals that most inspired us. In the midst of inspiration boards and brainstorming, I got this idea of a neat and orderly gardener and a wild plant spirit, each fighting to control the same garden.




After some more developing, refining, and Henrike reminding me that I had to keep my comic to only three pages, I boiled the story down to something simple: a determined gardener who wanted to plant sunflowers, and a bratty thistle imp who had no intention of giving up his weed patch!

Once I had the story mapped out in rough thumbnails; it was time to start designing! After a few quick reference studies, I started on the Thistle imp character. It took 35 thumbnails to come up with this guy! I probably could have taken the design further, but since I only had a week to do all the design work, I also had to know when to stop.





Next, I moved on to the gardener character. She came together a lot quicker, since I could contrast her design more with the Thistle imp's. 




With my two main characters designed, it was time to move on to the background visuals and figuring out the over all "look" of the comic. I knew I wanted to work with watercolor and after a few tests, I decided to go with my usual colored pencils, inks, and watercolors. Since meticulously detailed backgrounds are not my specialty, I kept the weed patch design loose and sketchy. This is also when I picked my colors. Since working with only a few colors is easier then dealing with every color of the crayon box, I chose greens and purples for the imp and the garden patch, and yellows and browns for the gardener and her sunflowers. 




Originally, I considered using red in a climactic scene, but ended up nixing that idea because it didn't fit well.


I was also originally considering putting the watercolors in first, then adding the ink, but that ended up being too difficult to pull off.


That about wraps it up for this post! Next time, I'll share the actual, finished cmic! ^_^

Thanks for reading! 
Bethany