Project Diary #3: Fixes, Progress and Style

So! Funny thing about comics: You have to draw a lot. This sounds stupid obvious but it's true in a way it's easy to forget when you're tackling it. And this also, has some funny side effects.

For someone like me, who's used to draw in like... small bursts (or maybe big bursts IDK) I'm usually not too worried about consistency. When working on The Black Mirror stuff I try to keep everything under certain guidelines to make it recognizable somehow. But each pic is its own thing most times, and when you've been working over maybe a couple years over a project you might expect the style to evolve and change in between.

Well, when drawing a comic you draw SO MUCH that change happens from one page to the next. That's one of the reasons I decided to sketch everything, then draw everything, then ink everything... And so on... This takes some of that offset away by building the pages in layers. If I were to make a page from scratch to finish fore attacking the next page, the style gap would be too noticeable. Specially for a 9 pages thing.

If I were to work on a longer project I wouldn't be able to do it like this, since it becomes WAY too tedious to just layout a fuckton of pages, the sketch a fuckton of pages... At some point it just becomes torture. So most artists do these thing in batches of say, 3 or 5 pages at a time (some artists might go as to do it in halves for full issue 25 pages comics). This is, the reason so many webcomics have a sweetspot in style where the art hasn't become so repetitive that the artist is acting mechanically, but it also has practiced it enough it has settled and shines in a way it would've never have in the first pages.

At any rate, I caught style-evolvitis. And the only way I know to fix it is by backtracking and fixing some of the stuff I've been doing. I also have been looking at so many nice manga-like references that I have been taking ideas and formulas here and there to the point the style has nothing to do with what I was gonna do in the beginning. (I'm a bit like a kid in that regard... Every nice thing I see I wanna do it myself. Which is nice sometimes. But it's an awful thing to do when you're trying to do consistency.

So... Remember the first "MASTER-PAGE" that was supposed to set the guidelines for the rest?

Well... Scratch that.

Maybe not all of that. But certainly quite a lot. Specially when it comes to rendering (some of this shapes I like, some will get fixed).

Style RN looks a lot more like...

One day I'll produce the bible for this project with the guidelines I'm trying and utterly failing to follow.

I like where this is going. But some stuff really needs some fixes. And that's not to mention the stuff I have to backtrack to get up to date now.

So this is pretty much where we stand now.

Oh! BTW... Remember I mentioned I had to fix the plastic bag crashing panel? I might or might not have issues...

(From left to right "Horizontal emphasis", "Different heights", "Horizontal (should say vertical) sound effect", "careful with the rhythms")

ANYWAYS...

Progress and fixes:

#1

#2

BTW... I did some experiments on rendering style with this one:

#3

#4

If anyone has any particular interest about the whys of any of these changes feel free to drop me a line. As you can (hopefully) see these have usually been given some thought and aren't arbitrary things.

Also, please let me know if any of this babbling make any sense or is interesting at all for you peoples. :P

(As I'm posting this I'm looking at something else I'd like to fix... XD)

And, as always. THANKS A LOT FOR YOUR SUPPORT!!! ^^