#final comic

The Dailies Comic - Once in a daydream. (Final Comic)

ALPHA is a comic collaboration with my friend Pablo Jimenez. The short script is the start of a longer story. In this first sequence we see how a prisoner in a walled medieval city is sentenced to die by expulsing him from the city. The menace that threatens the live of whoever dares leaving the protection of the walls is left unknown at the end of this first part.

This first Post shows the first part of the process where the layout for each page has been designed in a thumbnail size and scanned in order to be scaled up and traced over in major detail and accuracy.

This is a contact sheet with the colour thumbnails for each page, to get an overall feeling of the chosen palette. The different palettes used to reach the final version are displayed in swatches at the bottom of the sheet. In this stage the colour works well in a small scale. However, when the outlines are overlayed on top the colours detract from the drawing. Hopefully this is only due to the abstraction at this rough first stage, which needs more definition and work on the tonal values, but there’s a chance of it being because they are too bright and opaque and draw too much attention. 

Underneath I’ve attached the same thumbnails scaled up and with the outlines overlaid on top to get a better sense of what it looks like at this level.

This first page is the one I’ve worked the most on, and even though while working on it I felt quite happy and motivated (thus the amount of detail) after receiving some feedback I realised how little experience I have with the media and how far I am from the level of mastery it takes to develop a more expressive, minimalistic approach...After watching a few tutorials, I’ve realised that even though I’d really like to be able to master this media there’s little time left for the final submission and if this technique detracts from the drawing I may as well submit it in black and white. I believe, though there may still be time to do it with watercolours, so I’ll definitely give that a go.

ASSESSMENT TWO: FINAL

Hooray, the final product!!

I’m quite proud of how this turned out - visually, it’s very close to what i had in my head, which is always nice. I’m also really pleased with the way the pastels play off the greys; the colours definitely turned out better than I expected. I seriously overcommitted on this one; 24 panels is like 3 pages, and I did nine and a half. It was definitely a lesson in exactly how much information can go into a panel; a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s also only one panel. 

It was a really good chance to play around a bit more with the idea of ‘beats’ and seeing how the dialogue has a natural rhythm - some exchanges can happen in a single panel, while others require three or four depending on what is being discussed or how much visual support is needed.

It was also good to experiment with shortcuts - for example cutting out the background in panels that focus on a character’s face. I think this has worked better in some places than in others, but the theory is sound. Sometimes the detail can distract from the story, so it’s good to know when to keep it and when to lose it.