#juniorstudio

Hey Ya’ll!

This past week I spent some time taking notes on an online tutorial/workshop from CartoonSmart.com called “How to Make Comic Strips” by Paris Christou. It’s a six hour series which I finished during the week. It basically outlines the general process of developing appealing characters, reusable digital character sheets, coming up with scripts/humor and how to produce and organize comics. 

I won’t bore you with all the details but some of the highlights from my notes include simplifying characters, stages for drawing characters quickly and in different poses/from different angles, integrating squash and stretch and placing high importance on line of action as shown below in these screen shots of a lesson: 

I also focussed on reading and working through my textbook on digital painting in photoshop this weekend. I set up my tablet, Photoshop preferences and played around with tools for a bit just to get used to it. I’ll begin re-developing my character/s, making character/model sheets, scripts, thumbnails and hopefully a comic strip or two by the end of this quarter (so probably I’ll just be working on character re-designs this coming week). 

Hello everyone! This week I finished the other two under-paintings. Below is a picture of the one from last week with water added to the watercolor pencil drawing, and then the other two images (also first one in pencil, second one with water added/”painted” on).

By next week I expect to finish the pastel layers on all of the paintings. Currently, these images look very bright and almost like daytime scenes but by next week they will be darker/night scenes (hopefully).

Hello there!

For this week I finished the final draft of my paper and started the under-paintings for my final three drawings. 

The thumbnail sketches I settled on are the top right from the first set of four, the top right from the second set of four and the bottom left from the third set of four (from my previous post of sketches). I thought that doing two environments and one close up of Small Boy would help tell the story, give variety and also “acting” amongst the backgrounds so that there’s a good mixture of it all. I also just really like that drawing of Small Boy and I think it will give me a good opportunity to create some strong lighting on his face. 

I’ve decided to use the Arches watercolor paper that we used for our class last quarter. I have paper that is specifically for pastels but it is only for dry media and much smaller. The Arches paper was the size I wanted and is also cold pressed with a decent amount of texture so that I can be sure that after the under-paintings there will still be enough tooth to grab the pastel pigment. Starting with the sketch from the first set of images, I used watercolor pencils to map out and color in washes for the first layer (photo below). I have not added water yet so the color is quite dull at this point but I do want to keep it dark because it is a night scene. However, it will liven up and sharpen some once I add water and the layers of pastel over the top.

I will do the other two “maps” this coming week and begin adding water/pastel pigment soon. I decided to cut off the paper from the block and tape each one to separate art boards so that I can work on them simultaneously. That way, while one is drying from either water or fixative I can be working on the others to save time.