Otto & Olya Pages 3-5 Commentary

Hey there everyone, apologies for it being a while since the last post. I’ve had a series of setbacks from an unexpected technical problem - my iPad had some irreparable damage, forcing me to buy a new one, and the new one has been stuck “restoring” from a 375GB iCloud back up for the last SIX DAYS and it still isn’t finished. Due to the stupid nature of how iOS works I can’t even open Procreate until it is finished restoring, and that’s where all of my work files are. 25GB to go! The lesson here is to not keep all your files locally on the iPad (or in iCloud) and back them up to some kind of physical storage.

Also, candidly, I suffer from periodic bouts of depression which just murders my ability to do any work. Apologies. New O&O pages are in progress though, I should have 7 or 8 new ones to post soon.

In the meantime here’s some more thoughts on Pages 3-5:

Page 3

Here are the digital pencils:

And final inks:

I used a video of a woman dancing for Olya’s posing, I wanted it to feel contiguous so I took a few screengrabs a couple of seconds apart and used them for reference. Originally there was nothing behind her but the page felt a bit empty, so I added the heavy black waves in the background to balance out the “weight” and suggest the hypnotic thrumming of the music. You can also see where I whited out her legs in the middle pose - the full length legs felt off to me and were cropped at an awkward place at the panel border.

Page 4

Original rough digital pencils:

This page (originally slated to be page 5) was tricky for me, I wanted to communicate that Otto was watching over Olya on the dancefloor and scanning the crowd for anyone who might be intruding on her dance, and I wanted to do it without any text. I wasn’t sure that I was capturing it just yet and I went through a bunch of little variations. I posted it to a private Discord group that I’m on with some other artists and got some interesting suggestions:

I thought this one was a little too repetitive and the tier of small panels felt too busy.

This reconfiguration of the composition of the panels felt more correct to me, and helped draw a bolder connection between Otto’s closeup eyes and the men he’s looking at. I decided to go with this one.

The next issue was Otto’s thumbs up, which in this moment didn’t quite feel right to me either. I tried a few variations, first recomposing the panel to be a little less awkwardly cramped:

Then trying it without the thumbs up, and maybe just a stoic nod (I sometimes like “sound effects” that are in fact a verb describing the action):

Then I tried it with both:

Ultimately I settled on the nod, but removing the motion lines and making the word solid black to make it bolder against the background.

The final inked page:

You might actually notice some differences from the raw inked page to the final:

I felt that the dancefloor between Otto and Olya was a little too sparse (in a later page he has to push his way through a crowd) so I added a few more people digitally in the middle ground between them. I also made some adjustments to Olya’s face and hair in the final panel, to give her a livelier expression and use the hair to suggest her tossing her head back. And finally done!

Page 5

This page was also a bit of a difficult one to crack! I was unexpectedly inspired by going to an exhibition at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and seeing the work of Italian photographer Maurizio Galimberti, who creates portraits of his subjects by taking dozens of Polaroids from slightly different positions and collages them together. I was fortunate enough to witness him there in person creating a piece on the spot, and it occurred to me that they looked like comics panels and it could be an interesting page design. I wanted to do a page of Olya dancing that captured the effect of a strobe light, catching her in various “frozen” positions layered on top of each other and Galimberti’s collages gave me a good direction on how to accomplish it.

Pencils:

This was accomplished by again referencing that same video of the dancer, grabbing a few more poses for reference, sketching each pose then putting them all into the grid and figuring out how to selectively delete portions of each. It took some experimentation but finally arrived at this composition I was happy with.

It took a bunch of experimentation to get the tones of the individual panels right - I wanted each panel to represent a different moment in time and so each would have different lighting and shadows to represent the pulsing light of the nightclub.

I wasn’t entirely happy with this and so I again put it to my small Discord group of artist friends and was given suggestions like making some of the panels negative:

Frankly I didn’t really like this approach. I was getting frustrated until it was suggested that I make the borders black, creating the feeling of a brief moment of darkness between each panel.

This was it! It finally clicked for me. In the end this is one of my favorite pages I’ve ever done.