An Emblem

Do you remember my Virgin Mary? I traced and coloured her in Illustrator. Last Monday I had a go at designing an emblem for my Gawain site, taking into account a few things I had learnt from the Mary Experiment. This time I didn't trace, but made my own design, once more based on the Book of Kells. It was fun, though I suspect there must be better ways of doing the knotwork than the process I used ;).

Well, I hope you like it. Personally, I find the wide-eyed, never-smiling Celtic look rather endearing *g*.

Ale & Wenches

Especially for Wim: the same page lettered with Ale & Wenches. Please do let me know how it reads. I like this font a lot, but personally I feel that Red State, Blue State is easier to read. Would definitely use Ale & Wenches for captions, though - the medieval feel is just great.

PS: try the full view to see the page at the size it will be posted in :).

More test thingies

I am, as you know, very busy experimenting with all sorts of techniques for the final version of the comic. Below are two pages from the storyboard that I used for testing Photoshop stuff on. The first page has been coloured digitally; the second one has been lettered digitally with a free font from Blambot.

Please let me know what you think!

I coloured this in a very simple way, and relatively quickly. The result is not too bad, I think. But next, I tried to colour the page below and soon discovered that everything gets really complicated and time-consuming once there are several frames on one page :/. Part of the troubles originated from my use of vector paths as panel frames. I won't need to *draw* frames in Photoshop in the final version, so that's a bit of mess I wouldn't have to worry about, but still: my skills are not quite up to scratch.

I rather like this font. It's not difficult to letter in Photoshop, and to be honest, I kind of enjoy getting neat letters in neat lines. I never draw lines when I hand-letter, just because it's too much of a bore. But the result tends to be a little bit ... well ... amateurish :). But ... do you like the digital version?

A Test with Morgana

File under: Experiment.

I am trying to figure out how best to go about drawing the comic. The questions are many: colour or monochrome? Pencil or ink? A4 or A3? It is important to get everything right, so that I don’t run into trouble at some point in the future.

I had more or less decided on inks and monochrome, because black and white is what I think I do best. Colour still gives me trouble. I adore watercolour, but I am not good enough at it to paint a comic. I have seen digital colours that I like, but I don’t have the Photoshop skills to achieve them myself. Nevertheless, in a comic in which the colour of the hero’s hair and, occasionally, the colour of his enemies plays a part in the story, it would be kind of nice to have colours.

Now – one way of colouring that I do feel up to is with colour pencils. I like what I can do with pencils on the pages of my Moleskine notebook, so I sought loose sheets on which I could more or less reproduce that effect. The paper that I think comes closest to Moleskine is Bristol board. So I had a try with that. The result is this:

The original is very crisp and, I think, rather pretty (if I may say so myself). I think it reproduced fairly well… The skin tones are very delicate, and some of their subtlety got lost, as did the blue of her eyes – but all in all I think the scan is not so bad.

In order to judge the effect in a comic page, I will have to actually draw and colour a complete page, I guess. Still, I’d much appreciate your opinion about this little test. What do you think?

I also made a version with texture added in Photoshop. This is not difficult and could easily be done in the comic too, I suspect.

One disadvantage that colour will always have is that it is more expensive to print than black and white. That is in case anyone besides myself would like to hold a paper version of the story .

Anyway: I would love to hear your opinion on this – on the feasability of a comic drawn entirely in pencils, a comic coloured with colour pencils etc. Please let me know what you think!

Say Hi to Gawain

Because once in a while, he actually comes out looking more or less the way he should look. Now for a nice colour scheme...

No, seriously: why on earth is it so difficult to draw my main character properly?! *sigh*



This was drawn with mechanical pencils in a Moleskine sketchbook. (I am liking the combination of Moleskine and pencils more and more.) It took several hours. (Don't ask.) No reference used. (Bad habits die hard.) Finally, the sketch was slightly pimped in Photoshop. (No cleaning; just added texture and some highlights.)

So there.