The Art and Musings of Bethany Pyles: July 2018

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.