It's finally here, the end is in sight! Just have one more project to turn in, one take home test to do, and two finals to show up for, and I'm done. Exciting, is it not? It also explains why I'm a week and a half late on my post.
Well, this one's another doosy, so get ready.
The first thing I'm showing today, is the comic project I just finished for my Image Design class. We were to choose a childhood toy (technically our favorite, but any would do), and draw a comic about that toy. I chose one of the stuffed animals I've had since I was little (Ok, littler than I am now at least): Piggy, my stuffed pig. Now, Piggy's a bit beat up, he's had some adventures in his day (entirely innocent, I assure you), and so I thought a comic on one of his adventures would be a great story.
Now, I decided, through the course of making the comic, that it would probably be best to leave it without any dialogue (You know, the fact that the dialogue I had planned was more a tribute to my geekdom, than anything else had absolutely nothing to do with it. ) The story told itself without any of that, and I felt that adding in the speech bubbles and words would just clutter the design up - so I left it free!
Also, when I was working on the comic, I wasn't sure if we were allowed to use greyscale or not, the assignment sheet specified black and white, but nothing else. So, in order to get greyscale without breaking the rules, I found some screentone patterns and used those, which I discovered to actually be really helpful, because it limited me and kept me from going overboard. It also made it much easier to keep my greys consistant between panels and pages.
The way I put the comic together was panel by panel. After laying the story out, thumbnailing, and then laying the panels out in a computer program, I printed the panels one by one, and did my pencils and inks straight into that panel. When I was finished with that I scanned everything in, toned all the panels individually in photoshop, and then put them all together into the pages. Each step (pencilling, inking, toning) took anywhere from 6-14 hours. It was kind of crazy.
Anyway, enough of me babbling on that. Just read it!
As I promised, here's the children's book (Shel Silverstein's
The Giving Tree). This was done with cardstock hand-cut and glued together. The 3d effect is given by separating the pieces into layers by using small pieces of foam core. I made the paper for the tree, itself, because I couldn't find a texture I was happy with; so I took a brown paper Kinko's bag, wrinkled it up until it was soft, and then sprayed spray adhesive to one side of it, and glued it onto a piece of dark-brown cardstock.
Up next: Character design and sketches.
The goal of these was to get a feel for the characters before actually drawing the comic. This way, when I started drawing the panels, the characters would come more easily and naturally, and they wouldn't look stiff because I hadn't thought out how they would look from each angle and how they would move. Expressions are important as well - without them, a scene can seem very flat as all characters need to be able to interact with their surroundings both visually and verbally. The visual is even more important when there are no words in the comic.
