Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Inheritors

This week in the comics class I'm teaching - did I mention I'm teaching a comics class? - we're starting the final semester project, and next week's assignment is to bring in a couple of pages' work of thumbnails, rough layouts, and value roughs. So last night I whipped up a few pages as a sample, based on an idea that just popped into my head. Working title is Inheritors, which is probably one of those Aristocrats-style titles that works better if you don't try to explain it.

First, crude character sketches - just enough to get started with layouts.



Then a few pages' worth of rough layouts. I'll spare you the indecipherable horror of my thumbnail sketches.




And finally, sample value roughs. It took me a couple of tries to get these into workable shape; there's a reason we normally don't plot and lay out comics stories in overnight binges.



In the penultimate panel of page 2, I might shift the figure leftward and move the balloon to the right. Easy enough to do in Photoshop.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice!! Very informative to see your process. :)

Mark Simmons said...

This actually isn't my normal process - I usually put in the values in the layout stage, rather than doing a pure line drawing and futzing around with value options later. (I mean, who does that?) But this is the process we're using for the class project, so I wanted to practice what I'm scheduled to be preaching. :-)