Friday, July 31, 2009

Final layout--for the first chapter

As of today, I finished the last four pages of my first 12-page chapter.

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Got the comic laid out in a way that I'm feeling...I'm going to start drawing the first page on Monday. Got a busy weekend ahead.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

More comic layouts

The second set of pages in the first chapter of my Jet Dancer comic book in development... while sketching these up (which isn't as easy as it may look), I also finalized the entire story. The first two stories I wrote were okay, but I wasn't excited by them. Then I stopped and thought about what I wanted to do with my story. The whole point is to establish a fun character. All I need to do is define her and have fun with it. It needn't be deep (like 99% of the other stories I come up with). So for me to come up with an action story that can be contained in a 48-page comic book (as opposed to, say, a 350-page novel) is quite an accomplishment for me.

Anyway, the layouts...

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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Working on comics...

I'm always fighting this internal battle. See, I'm in school for Graphics and Multimedia. My goal is to make video games. It seemed like a practical idea at the time...the industry is booming, I like games and I have a little code writing in my background, not to mention an appreciation for art and graphics. But I also have this unending drive to draw comics. I don't believe there's anything wrong with that, and the more I try to resist it, the more I just keep trying to do it.

So, with that, I have purged two of the three concepts that have plagued my mind and compelled me to be indecisive for the last decade or so, and have resolved to focus 100% of my creativity on one thing.

To that end, I went out and bought myself a pack of Canson Fanboy Comic Book Layout Pages. They're structured in such a way that makes it easy to plan rough thumbnails of comic pages complete with notes. Today I spent some time revising a story I came up with for my premiere character and I planned out a comic. Below are the thumbnails I scrawled up on my layout paper:

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I gotta say, it was fun. I felt like I was making some definite progress on good comic planning, and the paper only cost $3.88 (Utrecht was having a sale) for 35 sheets with four layouts each. That's far more than I need to create the book I'm working on, which I plan to produce within a year's time...a 48 page graphic novel featuring the one and only Jet Dancer.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

This layout...

...isn't working for me...

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Trying to get this last commission done...I have to admit I'm not happy with this composition, but this is about the fifth attempt at this. I know I'm capable of better.

I also know my client is getting impatient...