I am not one for typing out weekly or monthly blogs, and there is a reason for doing so. Each time I have attempted to do a weekly – monthly blog, I tend to forget about it in time. I prefer writing a big blog as I feel I can put more things in writing with process pictures rather than just have one sentence with a couple of images. In this blog, I will be putting in multiple images of my progress from character sketches to storyboards, screenshots of digital work etc.
Throughout this project, I have had some good and bad times when it comes to producing and drawing my graphic novel.
Starting from when I received the brief, I thought it was unusual to see a graphic novel at a square size, but I don’t see why you can’t try making it square right? I started my research or listing my research and to find artist inspiration from the web and a couple of art books in the library. I decided to illustrate my own short story, which I already had written called Confessions. It is based in a prison, with a prison owner and two elementals. Rusty, the fire elemental and Carlos, the earth elemental. When having a character design in mind, I like to make a small mood boards of how I would like them to look from head shape, skin colour, hair and colour, clothing etc. I decided to do a mood board for each character in that story before realising I had to cut a log of my story down for it to fit into 16 pages. So only 4 characters remained to develop as believable people.
My first character I had in mind is Rusty, my fire elemental. She is the daughter of Opal and is known to be quite hot headed; she is black with ginger hair. When thinking about her I wanted my fire elementals to be tribal and living in mountain caves or close to volcanoes. She is the main protagonist and she will be the one telling most of the story. Talking about what motivated her to commit the crime that ahs deemed as so cruel and feared by others. I wanted something read or something that resembled fire in her so I picked her orange eyes and her bright orange ginger hair. Whilst designing her I wanted her to have a strong athletic figure but still be feminine at the same time but show that there is physical reason to her motives. I liked the thought of her being scarred all over her body; she has not been a well-treated person in her past.
My second protagonist is Carlos, he is the earth element and is the one who thought of the idea of their crime, he is the brain, but he is a nice person usually, he knows Rusty through finding him injured and have since then had a father/daughter bond between them. When having his mood board, the hair style I picked did not feel right, He is an adult and in his 30s, but I wanted him to look like he was trying to look a little younger despite his wide face and narrow eyes, I tried going for a similar hair style with Rusty’s and only keeping the top half of his hair long, which suited him greatly. I had to look at a lot of muscular male body references before having an idea of drawing him.
The other two character Victor and Opal are only in a couple of the graphic novel pages… Opal is on the last page as she is not much of an important character until way later into the story that had to be cut.
Throughout this project, I had been attempting to use markers and traditionally drawing to improve myself instead of going digital, but after a lot of attempts of a couple of pages it looked like it was not working, I realised that working digitally would be my best and a safe bet for me the only problem was the program I would like to use. I game myself an option of three: Adobe Illustrator, Clip Studio Paint or Coral Painter. After attempting a page on each program I felt the most comfortable with Clip Studio Paint. The program was also useful when it came to speech bubbles as they were on the program to create, Clip Studio Paint was originally a program used for comics but then soon evolved for Manga artists and Comic artists. With using this program previous for other work it felt comfortable to use.
I started planning my pages and did overall 3 storyboards. I found it hard to be able to work within such a small size but I managed to find a way for it to work, when working on the dummy book I did more detailed sketches with the title near completion, I placed the speech bubbles in places that wouldn’t ruin a lot of the illustrations planned my panels but I knew once I had printed the final dummy that some things needed changing regards to drawings and panel sizes. As I was approaching my final I changed paged as I went along and the flow felt a lot better compared to my final dummy. After all that sketching and drawing, I had to think of colour. I realised that my flashback pages I wanted them to be simply coloured, nothing to complex. After some feedback on my work it was suggested that I have it black and white with two selected colours per page. I took that into consideration and tried the idea and I liked it enough to continue the idea.
Whilst planning my pages I was at a book binding class and taught how to hard back bind a book, which was really useful, and I wanted to try binding my book myself!
For the dust jacket, I had originally planned to have Rusty on it. But I thought that the main aim in the cover is to show no character, I wanted people to know that fire and destruction was involved in this story. I knew I wanted to keep simple, using just colours, the idea of an ink blot was suggested to me by a lecture as it’s meant to represent psychological confession instead of going down a religious confession route which it wasn’t. I had scanned in two inkblots I created and used the shape to fill with bright fire like colours and kept the background black. I preferred one inkblot to the other due to its shape and size compared to the other. I used Studio Clip Paint once again to colour and add textures into it, once done I put the image into an InDesign template and messed around with the placement of typeface. After attempting multiple placements, I decided to go save and what I knew was normal with most books.
Overall this project has been fun! It was great making my own graphic novel and binding it myself. Of course a couple of things could have improved, I mean when isn’t their anything to improve? I feel like I could have either gotten better paper for the hard back book or not put so much glue on the paper as I didn’t realise that their was so many wrinkles on the paper, a second thing I should have done is to have kept it squashed between heavy objects for a while as it has bowed slightly. When printing a couple of my pages double sided, they did not match in alignment with each other with one side having to be cut down more than the other which I thought was rather odd but no many how many times I tried it, it wouldn’t change.
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