One of the later pages of FANTASY BASKETBALL!, going from script to final page. This page is a little spoilery, but it’s also one of my favorites.
As you can see from the text, this page was basically done on-the-fly in the layout stage. Most of the action scenes (the best parts of the book), were written out loosely like that, and I had to figure out what the page needed to fit in with the flow of the story. I knew there were a couple visual gags or specific basketball plays that I wanted to work in, and this was a good chance for that.
I had a vague concept of what players each of my characters would resemble, so I had a pretty good idea of how they would play basketball. Wiz Kid is modeled after some of my favorite Point Guards and smaller Shooting Guards. She has floppy socks because Pistol Pete Maravich had floppy socks. I knew I wanted her to bounce the ball between Steps’s (the villain) legs (the soccer term for that is “nutmeg,” and that’s carried over to basketball), so there was my chance. She shoots a floater in panel five because that’s one of the most important shots for little guards to have – the ability to arc the ball high, rather than in the regular shooting form limits the chances of it getting blocked (a problem that Mug faced several times earlier on in the story). Figuring out which basketball players I wanted each character to play like made it a lot easier to find good photo or video reference.
Wiz’s FSH teleport mimics a something Steps does earlier, and is one of the several Dragon Ball references in the book. I wanted to have both her and Steps teleporting around the court, but that was too difficult to work out over a single page and so I simplified that for readability.
Steps is wearing a pair of Converse All-stars, which is what a lot of basketball players wore in the 60’s and 70’s, before more supportive shoes were introduced. They contributed to a lot of foot and ankle injuries due to this lack of support (FORESHADOWING). Steps’s pair has an upside-down pentagram instead of the classic star.
Panels three, four, and five are directly referenced from basketball clips that I’ve watched. I watch a lot.
For the whole time I was making the book, I was trying to fit in a specific joke that referenced one of my favorite color commentators, but I couldn’t figure it out. After the thing was printed, I realized it would’ve been perfect in the last panel of this page. I’m an idiot.
Changes from the layouts to the final:
1. Steps gets pushed pretty far out of frame in panel 3. I realized that I didn’t actually need him in the shot, I only needed his presence as a framing device to highlight Wiz’s breakaway.
2. A more major change – the hoop gets mirrored in panel 6. This could’ve gone either way without a major change in readability. In the end, I changed it for a couple of reasons – first, so that the direction of Wiz’s shot is the same as in the previous panel, and second, so there would be a slight beat between the hoop and between the reveal of the score.
3. The score in the text reads “9-8,” while in the final it’s “18-16.” Originally I was going to have the game go to 11, with 1’s and 2’s (as is pretty common in street ball), but switched it to the general, better known 2’s and 3’s used in organized basketball. Easier to understand on the fly.
This, like all of the pages in FANTASY BASKETBALL!, was laid out in Manga Studio, which I like a lot for the early stages of production. The panel system in that program is invaluable. The final drawing was done in Photoshop, at print size (5.5x8.5"), at 350dpi. The brush that I used was a modified version of Kyle T Webster’s ballpoint pen brush and is my main brush for linework.
For the texture, I very roughly blocked in where I wanted my tones, on one layer, with two slightly different levels of gray (somewhere around 35% gray and one closer to 60%). I set that layer to Multiply. I pulled a blotchy painted texture from my texture library (I think this one done in Acrylic paint), and, using a clipping mask, clipped it to my tone layer. I set this new layer to Overlay and adjusted the opacity. That’s it. The steps after the line drawing is complete are very minor.
I hand lettered the whole thing, which was fun. Everything was done on a Cintiq 22HD. It was fun.
-You can find a low-res layered file of this page here: DOWNLOAD
-You can buy a physical copy of FANTASY BASKETBALL in my SHOP
-Or you can buy a digital version on my GUMROAD
janainaart
dededos
blakekathryn
snowghoul
annaxmalina
kianamaiart
titsay
baratheonpilled
areudirty
