Artist Resources Comics 101

(Azure wearing her up-date sock)

I didn't really understand about making the flow of action coherent, plus my choice of angles for the action was flawed in a lot of panels. Since reading a book on how to draw comics I can see lots of places where I went wrong.

Er, call me stupid, but I see nothing wrong in those three sketches. The characters make flowing movements, seem to be full of energy.

 

The individual drawings are fine, but when the come together as a page that is telling a story there are some problems. On my first page, the first two panels work well but the bottom two are weak. I chose to show the action from a side-on view too many times, and particularly in the last panel that begins to make the layout monotonous. I could have done with change the angle for something more dramatic. At the time, I drew and redrew the panel until I gave up.

My second page suffers from having the figures at a fairly similar size throughout. The middle panel where the characters Death-Adder and Tigra battle it out underwater could have done with being bigger, giving it more impact. The last few panels showing Captain Mar-Vell fighting the female Captain Marvel (confusing, I know) were a struggle, and it shows. I think the angles could have been more dramatic, and I could have varied the size of the characters more.

My third page is my favourite, but I feel the Green Goblin's pumpkin bomb is not prominent enough in the panels where Moon Knight is feeling the effects of the gas. It's kind of lost in the detail, when in fact it should be the most important thing in the shot. Maybe putting it in the foreground more would have worked better.

 

I tried my hand at comics recently, but didn't think to post them here until HanSolo29 asked me some stuff about it and mentioned that it would fit here. So, here are my two pages, a scene from Rebel Dream by Aaron Allston:

[image=http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/187/a/5/Rebel_Dream_comic___1_of_2_by_SvenjaLiv.jpg] [image=http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/242/9/0/rebel_dream_comic___2_of_2_by_svenjaliv-d2xm4kb.jpg]

I was asked How do you determine the look of each section and where do you know where to place them? I'm far from an expert, but here's what I did.

I had the story already, but if I was making it up I guess I'd write the script first and then decide how best to illustrate it. Then I imagined how it would go in a movie. I worked from the top left across, then back to left and across, and so on. I didn't always know what was going to go where exactly; I divided up the bottom half of the page like it is because I knew that I wanted the big panel where Jaina thinks about her brothers and Chewie, and everyone leaving her. I experimented a bit with the three scenes at the side before settling on the "flashback" idea with the space battle being shown.

Overall, I tried to divide up the page so that the dialogue and action flowed well. Some lines - Jaina's "I know what you're going to say" followed by Jag's "I don't think you do", for example - got their own scenes because I wanted to focus on each character in turn. Others, I put together - "I don't know" and "You do know. Nobody else but you could know." - because they weren't that dramatic. Like I said, I thought of it a bit like a movie, and worked out how best to break up the story into separate little scenes.

It's also important, I think, to break up your panels so that it's not a series of uniformly-sized squares or rectangles. By varying the size - or sometimes leaving it out or using a circle - you can focus attention on a character's face or their reaction, and also make the page as a whole look more interesting. On the first page, you have Jaina talking about the conference room while pointing - on the page - over her shoulder at the next scene, in which they're walking towards that same room. In that case, it was better to leave out some of the margins because it transitioned better that way. My second page has lots more separate scenes because it's a conversation, and a lot of the lines were significant and needed their own scene, with a focus on the character. I also varied between closeups and shots from further away - again, this focuses attention and lets me create more drama. A closeup of a character's face tends to show more emotion, for example. They do the same thing in movies - wide shots for action, closeups for emotion.

My inspiration for a lot of this came from Edvin Bukovic's work on Rogue Squadron: The Phantom Affair. He was really, really good at dividing up his pages and drawing both action and interaction, and I think I learned a lot just by looking at how he did it. It's worth checking out for that aspect alone, although it's a really good story and quite funny as well.

I don't know if that helps any, but if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer!

 

With my graphic novels I try to capture the important scenes first in a drawing and after that the words will follow.

[image=http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk124/earlybird-obi-wan/forcenetart/tetrahedron08.jpg] is from my story Tetrahedron

and will be followed by this one

[image=http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk124/earlybird-obi-wan/forcenetart/tetrahedron09.jpg]
?Your son will appreciate the contents of the book.? Count Dooku had lifted the crystal out of the box and it began to shine with a red glow playing flaming patterns on Jango?s helmet and the silver decorations on Count Dooku?s robe.

 

Iverna, I particularly like the way you draw faces - very expressive, and the construction seems very strong.

earlybird-obi-wan, nice use of colour, as always.

 

I try to work the same way as the bird when I go for most of my fan fictions. The story must be able to stand on its own and the painting as well. It is even greater for me when they blend into one another. But I fear I would not have the patience to go for a comic. I have too much text for a story.