Saturday, May 23, 2020

Pencilling the new graphic novel!

I spent last year writing (short stories and a novel) so I've only recently returned to my next graphic novel, "Rumours of Wolves".

Here's the first page: layout sketch on the left, and pencils on the right.



This page was a horror to figure out, as it's an establishing shot and there was so much information I wanted to get in there. I used Maya to lay out the building, horses and people. 3D is more accurate, but my original rough felt more organic. I like to find a balance between "technically correct" and "looks nice", so when I do the inking, I'll freehand it over the 3D lines to get some wibble in there.

For the last graphic novel, I pencilled on paper and then scanned it, did corrections, then inked digitally. This time, I'm drawing it all digitally---all on Photoshop so far, but I want to move to Clip Studio Paint as it has some really nice comics-specific features.

My awesome friend Grace Crowley who does the webcomic Magellan gives me feedback on my pencilled pages, and she suggested adding horse poop on the ground for realism. (Okay, technically she didn't say that the horses had to be in the process of pooping, but I couldn't help myself.)




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