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!
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?
5 comments:
I like both "progressions"!
Coloring makes me wanna read further - in color :-)
The font indeed makes text much easier to read.
It's not such an interesting font however...
Would an "Ale & Wencher" font be over the top — or could that aid to the medieval atmosphere?
Oh, forgot to mention: you can find many free fonts also on http://www.dafont.com
I like the font you chose! I hope you'll like it too, the font I've chosen for the Boar (Rehr for dialogues and Eager Naturalist for Richard's thoughts).
As for the coloured page, it is nice indeed, but as I've already said, the b/w version is already perfecly fine for me.
@ Cecilia: Hee hee! I had a look at the fonts you mentioned. The comic is going to look almost hand-lettered :-). I'm curious to see the result!
As for colouring, digital colour has the advantage that you also get to keep your inked pages. It's easy to have two versions. BUT digitally colouring an entire comic is SO not easy if you want it to look a little bit nice... I would need to learn a great deal in order to manage it.
@ Wim: Ale & Wenches immediately caught my eye as I was looking around, but I was thinking it might look too fussy. The font isn't supposed to draw too much attention to itself. Ale & Wenches would certainly be fun for captions, though. For the sake of comparison, I have lettered the same page in Ale & Wenches; by all means let me know what you think :-).
Coloured comics simply sell better than black and white. But for a self-publisher they are also much more expensive ($8.51 instead of $4.09 per book for TDH's 120 manga format pages). On the web, of course, it makes no difference, and I do think that colour will appeal more. But 1) I have to be able to make it look nice enough, and 2) I have to be able to do it within a reasonable timeframe...
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