Inks

So after long, grueling hours, blah blah blah, here are the inked final boards of my three pages of Carol wandering around:





... Soo... yes. You'll notice the first page is really the best, even if I didn't get to finish doing groady textures on that fallen log. I ended up spending more time on that, while the other two sadly did not get as much love. However, I'm actually kind of surprised at myself over how well I did on them anyway! The last page especially, though the first panel on the second one is pretty good, too!

I'll go on more about the scenery inspiration and the ~meaning~ of the story when I get home from school.

Pencils, Rough Pencils

So... I'm bad and I didn't scan during the rough pencil phase. You... didn't miss much, just picture these, but with lumpy and/or scribbly shapes instead of trees and rocks, and no features on Carol but her eyes. Fun, eh?

As for these pencils, I kind of like them! I do. There was a moment where I was like '... wait, crap' when I realized that I actually might have to FIX some of the rough shapes from before, but hey, I think I managed.





So... yes. Carol looks kind of terrifying in that last shot, which I suppose is partially intentional, since I meant for her to be kind of crazy...

Okay, story time. Once upon a time, I created Carol. I made her with the intent of writing her as, like, cartoony-crazy, but playing completely straight where I could. At the time she was possibly going to interact with other characters.

The story behind her crazy was that she decided to be a Mountie, but she didn't want to go to any school or do any training so she figured the next best thing was to live in a fire watchtower and watch for fires. She spent a few years in there and got kind of lonely (but she was a little toony before she climbed up there anyway). And bored. So she made her outfit out of drapes (but I have no idea where she got the hat). She also started collecting bones from animals she hunted for food (Or, uh, found, if that thought disturbs you), and she talks to them and/or uses them as puppets.



But then, she kind of grew away from all this. She's a little subdued, in that she isn't all action-first (the thing she was written for initially had a lot of fighting in it), and she's less chatty. She tends to emote more than anything, but that might just be the style of storytelling I picked (more on that next post). She doesn't need to bounce ideas off her inanimate objects, she follows her own train of logic.

I also did some design changes, as you might have noticed: I've drawn her teeth in completely, and I've made her irises wider.

Funny story, actually: I basically draw irises without pupils all the time - it used to be because I was drawing so small (since I could only ever find time to do so during class or when otherwise occupied, I'd have to draw in the corner of pages, see), or because they were just looking kinda weird... Well, the weirdness extended to the point where whenever I added pupils to eyes, the effect was a) the character looked crazy, b) the pupils were uneven so either one eye was more focused, or they were looking in different directions, or c) both.

Right now I'm kind of trying to use this to my advantage, where I only give pupils to characters that are crazy with rage, or just plain crazy. Carol is one of the latter, and to make it easier to line up her eyes, I'm making her irises huge. It also serves to add to the craziness, right? I admit I was also inspired by these two artists and their wonderful comics: Tessa Stone and Madeline (... I couldn't find her last name, sorry).

And WOW this was long-winded. Next post with the inks will be up soon, see you then!

Stage 1: Thumbnails

So naturally the first thing you want to do when making a comic is to sketch out your ideas and such, and then block the first few panels with some good ol' fashioned thumbnails!

I went through a few designs and scripts before I settled on Carol, and one of the main reasons is because her story was so fun to arrange!


Page 1 and 2...


Page 3

So, that first page of thumbs, as you can see, also includes some notes to myself, and a half-finished drawing of our main character, Carol, with a terrifying grin befitting a ventriloquist dummy!

But more important are the thumbnailed drawings.

SEE the story is that her fire-watchtower collapsed from old age and a termite invasion, so now Carol is left without a home or anything really to do, so she collects her stuff and starts walking. She's probably heading for civilization, but with her, who knows?

The three pages I'm going to draw for this assignment take place after she collects her stuff. So... Probably page three, actually, assuming the first and second page is a two-page establishing shot of the collapsed tower, and the third is her looking at this disappointedly and starting to collect her stuff. Maybe a dramatic pose.

In any case, this is the start of her journey. So, I start with a tame panel layout, four panels evenly down the page, with different scenery, but Carol positioned so that it looks like she's walking down the same path across the page. Neat, huh?

The next page has probably the weakest layout in terms of interesting stuff, but I tried to do a parallel thing there. See, the first panel, she's sliding down, while in the panel below that, she's climbing up; the second panel has her walking away and to the left, looking at the ground, fascinated, while the last one has her walking towards the reader, looking up and pouting.

Now, thumbnail page 2 is a little confusing - I sketched out one version of page three, then had a crisis about this assignment and quickly doodled a backup three page thing with a more interesting storyline with more dialogue and such, but... Honestly, despite playing with the panels, I liked Carol's layout more. That, and I don't plan on continuing the comic in that backup soon (I'm waiting on skill improvement and plot development), whereas Carol is something I've been meaning to do and casually work on for awhile.

So, yeah, I went back to Carol, and in the little doodle at the bottom right is a more interesting panel layout I came up with at the last second. That time, I play with sequence in the top three panels, while the bottom three are kind of like a zoom.

Yup, that's it for this post! Tune in next... Post for the rough pages! And boy do I have a story to tell with that one.

First Post! (Introduction)

This is a project blog by your friendly neighbourhood Ariel Meitz.

Usually, you'd find me at my artblog/sketchblog, T.Rexila Draws Some Stuff, but since this is a special project, and since I plan on continuing it later, and since my teacher told me to, it's getting its own site, to keep it better organized, and so you don't have to fish through tags and posts to find it.

Now... The project in question? It is three pages of a comic I've been wanting to do for awhile.

The premise:

Carol is an ongoing story of a girl of questionable sanity wandering the deepest woods of Canada, seeing sights majestic, whimsical, and weird on the way.

That's the short version. I'll edit the long version when I get it back from my editors, but rest assured I'll have more goodies for this blog shortly.