Monday, July 20, 2009

Little Samurai - Issue 1 layouts

I chose to focus on picking which moments to use and pacing the story first so the composition of each panel may still change as I finish each page. This will be an online comic as far as I know until there is a demand for printing. There will be three issues in this story arc and this is issue 1.

Each page is 10x15" on my computer currently at 150 dpi because they are only thumbnails. The final pages are going to be 300 dpi for the possibility of future printing. Everything is a vague description right now but I will get more specific as time progresses. I will be updating these pages routinely so the layouts will evolve.

page 1


page 2


page 3


page 4


page 5


page 6



page 7


page 8


page 9


page 10


page 11


page 12


page 13


page 14


page 15


page 16


page 17


page 18


page 19


page 20


page 21


page 22


page 23


page 24


page 25


page 26


Self Critique:

I have a tendency to choose very flat viewing angles. Most of my camera angles are perpendicular to the picture plane and there is a lack of depth and design. Examples of my boring camera angle and repetitive composition can be seen on page 16-18 with every wide shot being very similar looking. I need to use more 3/4 views, apply the use of either formal or informal design to my compositions, and make better use of overlap and perspective to convey depth and dimension. These posts are going to be work in progress for a while because I naturally work in phases to prevent myself from getting stuck on any particular problem.

Notes:

It is tempting to draw the whole thing on the computer. I have been going back and forth between traditional pencil drawing and the wacom tablet. I have to admit I am leaning more towards digital for most of the work. I would like to add more variations to panel shapes such as jagged panels for action scenes. I made changes to the layouts for about a few weeks now and I finally thing it looks okay now. Time to do some real drawing now. Finishing the page is the hard part. I'm having a hard time on page 23 trying to convey that the bear turns into three foxes. I gotta find a way to do it better.

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