CHARLOTTE BANCHINI
PRACTICAL SKILLS
THE POEM
Writing the poem to go alongside my comic was one of the most interesting parts of the production I'd have to do, and it was also one I would have to do at the beginning of production. This is because the poem is what pretty much dictates the entire format and flow of the comic itself. How poems are read is very purposeful, and a range of different techniques are used so that it's read with the pace that the author intended. As my poem will not be a standalone piece, but instead something that is intended to be seen alongside matching visuals, it's important that the flow is made clear.
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I've written poetry in the past, and though it may not be considered at a professional level since it's something I only consider myself a hobbyist at, I have previous experience with learning and formatting the medium. While this part of my project isn't necessarily the medium of art that is at the forefront of my FMP, it's an element that is crucial to document in order to understand my creative decisions.
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The first thing I did was gather poems that inspire me, that have similar feelings and that the intended audiences of were similar to the intended audience I have. One big thing to note is the commodification of poetry excerpts, especially among poems and their authors that are in contexts that are important to be dismissed. In the digital age, it's easy for people to take quotes from poems about the author's experience as a person of colour, member of the LGBTQ+ community, apart of the disabled community or otherwise marginalised groups, completely out of context. This results in the original context and the meaning of that poem being lost by people cherry-picking the parts of the poem that they can apply to a broader audience, and in turn making that author only known for that quote.
This is especially prevalent on platforms like TikTok where short form content thrives without explanation or added context, and while it's not intended to be harmful, it's something important to acknowledge in the world of poetry. While my poem is not especially charged with the message of a marginalised group, regardless of it being from the point of view of one, I think this commodification of poetry is something that has lead many poets to believe there needs to be one 'standout line' from their poem that can be recontextualised for the sake of popularity and reaching a larger audience. I don't want to do do that, i want my poem to be authentic to me and my story, not made for the consumption of a large audience - i think making your poem accessible to everyone is sometimes a fault, because in watering down our own experiences we can lose the nuance and importance of intersectionality and appreciating the fact that yes, not everyone's experience is the same.
In the above poems I tried to find pieces of writing that had the same themes I intended to convey in my own poem. In my research I've already looked into the themes in a surface level sense, but in this more targeted research in tandem with the actual production of my poem, I'm able to dissect the poems further to identify why these poems have the same feel as what I want to make.
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For starters, a common occurrence in each of these poems is that they can almost completely be read as full sentences. In a way they can read somewhat like someone's diary or memoir, and this sort of format is quite fitting to my project's theming as it's personal to me and vulnerably expresses my thoughts and feelings of college. The structure of these poems lends themselves to being read at a reader's own pace, but still having pointed line breaks to split up the flow. Splitting sentences into different lines is an easy way to give more weight to the words, as they are read more purposefully - this can be especially effective when you have the majority of a sentence on one line, and the most impactful last couple words on a line of their own. The format of poetry is also perfect as a starting point for building the different panels of a comic, dedicating one page of a comic to per line etc. But this is something I'll workshop as I continue making my storyboard.
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Another element of the poetry is the language used, in these poems the language is quite formal and metaphorical and this is something that falls in line with my own poem. The lack of colloquial language is very purposeful, because while that type of language is expected of this generation it's more emotionally impactful to use word choice that emphasises the core emotions of the scene that will be visualised. I want to use a lot of symbolism in my visuals, so using the same technique in my poem will make both elements of my project fit together more cohesively.
PROCESS OF WRITING THE POEM
After the extensive amount of research into poetry I already knew I liked the look and feel of, I started formatting my own. Considering my past experience with writing poetry, I've found that I tend to stray away from the type of poem that we were taught to analyse in school - poems filled with different techniques, to the point they sometimes felt like they were made solely for the sake of showing off those different elements of a poem. I myself don't like the type of poem with a rhyming scheme, or a huge amount of alliteration. When I think of language techniques like that, nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss books are the kind of media that come to mind, it doesn't fit the exact tone I'm going for with this whole project at all.
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In the place of rhyming schemes and an abundance of alliteration, I've tried to use personification and metaphors to my advantage. They may come off as pretentious or meaningless, but to the right people, who relate to the message I'm conveying, they're able to see themselves and their experience in those metaphors. Additionally, personification in the way of humanising the absence of friendships and the loneliness that was felt before we found this friend group, further conveys that feeling of loss by making it a person, and making loneliness seem like a person themselves make it feel more impactful to lose them, despite no longer being lonely being a positive thing.
Reflection:
As the comic will be more based around the poem than vice versa, it was important to me to dedicate a good chunk of time to really honing in the different language and structure techniques I used. The poem isn't just an addition to the comic after all, it's the thing that controls the narrative the most with its own beats and the message woven into each line. I'm no poet, I wouldn't call myself a professional writer or even a hobbyist, but writing is something that connects me more to conveying my feelings and love in a more digestible way. And to say there is no disconnect between my thoughts and the limited words I have to express them would be a lie, but I think that only makes my poem better up for interpretation for people to imprint their own stories onto, while still being explicitly about me, my friends and my experiences. The poem may not fall into the art part of this FMP, but it was good point for me to jump off from as it allows me to form a structure for the comic, based on the format of the poem itself! This poem will be a key part of the rest of my creative process of creating this comic, and I wholly intend for the original message of this poem; those themes of identity, love, loss and change, to not be lost. Those themes may not be obvious at first, in between the lines and in recurring motifs of hands and home and rebirth, but they will be there.
Reflection:
As the comic will be more based around the poem than vice versa, it was important to me to dedicate a good chunk of time to really honing in the different language and structure techniques I used. The poem isn't just an addition to the comic after all, it's the thing that controls the narrative the most with its own beats and the message woven into each line. I'm no poet, I wouldn't call myself a professional writer or even a hobbyist, but writing is something that connects me more to conveying my feelings and love in a more digestible way. And to say there is no disconnect between my thoughts and the limited words I have to express them would be a lie, but I think that only makes my poem better up for interpretation for people to imprint their own stories onto, while still being explicitly about me, my friends and my experiences. The poem may not fall into the art part of this FMP, but it was good point for me to jump off from as it allows me to form a structure for the comic, based on the format of the poem itself! This poem will be a key part of the rest of my creative process of creating this comic, and I wholly intend for the original message of this poem; those themes of identity, love, loss and change, to not be lost. Those themes may not be obvious at first, in between the lines and in recurring motifs of hands and home and rebirth, but they will be there.
COMIC STRUCTURE
Once I had settled on the format of my poem is when I could finally get a start on the more traditionally artistic part of my project, and also the centre of it as a whole. With the poem done, I already had a predetermined 'amount of content' to include, and by giving myself a rule such as 'each one or two lines of the poem has its own panel' etc. I was able to start visualising how to space and size each panel to fully convey the moments from my life I'm trying to show to people who may not know my story. Composition and pacing is the driving force of a comic, so it's important to get this right before anything else, without an easy to follow composition the comic will be messy, hard to read and overall overwhelming to a viewer.
And while this comic and narrative is first and foremost made for and about my friends, and thus be more easily accessible and understandable to them, it will inevitably be seen my people who don't know us and our story. So I want to tell it as best as I can, within the limit of a few pages of painted out authentic, raw memories that have shaped me, and a poem dedicated to the love my friends and I have experienced as a result of one another.
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After looking more into the 'webtoon' style of comic style (on my research page as well as on my planning page) which combines standalone drawings without any borders, and the regular panel style of comics, I decided it would be the style I went ahead with while storyboarding my comic. I chose this because it gives me a lot less restrictions with my formatting and how I lay out my story. Additionally, when doing the first drafts of my comic's storyboard I thought the strict lines and geometric boxes of the traditional comic style didn't really fit the vibe of my comic. The comic is about the messy and complicated years that our friendships formed within, in ta key developmental part of our lives, I want the format of the comic to depict that, with odd panel sizing and spacing and lack of panels altogether in some places.
Here are a few of the finished storyboard pages of my comic. In the storyboard, I favoured using a lot of purposeful asymmetry to give a feeling of almost uncertainty as shown by the constant changing structure of the comic pages. In a way I made up the comic format as I went along, using a very rough storyboard at first and then cleaning it up to make the pages here. A big element of my comic's structure is the amount of free space or lack thereof, some pages having panels that are full to the brim with content to convey a specific feeling (the long, middle panel of the first page for example, full of shadowed figures that frame the centre subject to create a sense of crowdedness, yet isolation in someone being singled out as the focus.)
The sizing of my panels in combination with the amount of space used within and outside of them helps to create the ideal pace for reading my comic. An example of this is the standalone drawings that don't have any borders surrounding them, they're more detailed and have more space around them for the eye to linger on, these drawings acting as a moment of pause in between the normally structured panels.
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The way I've utilised composition most noticeably in the comic is by using leading lines and asymmetry I believe. I've previously said that the reason for the amount of asymmetry is because it creates a much more purposefully 'messy' appearance that matches the messy time that is the ages 16 - 18 etc. and the complicated nature of breaching the gap between teenager and adult, all while figuring out who we are and who our friends are. A lot of the comic is disjointed in appearance, most panels being off centre or unaligned with the previous one, but this is done intentionally and I'm hoping it conveys the feelings I wanted.
Additionally, I've overlaid a couple of panels over the top of each others, which from my "pacing in comics" research I've learnt helps to quicken up the pace of my comic. These panels are also a lot smaller, making them even easier to digest and despite having detail, they don't force the reader to linger on them longer. In a way they act as the 'in betweens' of my comic, in the same way they would be if it were an animation. They help transition from one scene to the next or give context behind one jumping forward in time considerably.
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While this is the finished storyboard, I've left a lot of my panels empty as I'm not sure what specific scenes of those moments in my life I want to depict, so I've only left a few notes for now to know what day etc. I'll be drawing within that panel. The figures that I have drawn have been left very vague so that there is room for more adjustments to be made as I go forward, only focusing on the basic anatomy without thinking of how I can force some more purposeful perspective or use techniques like pulling back from a scene and revealing more elements surrounding it etc. This is something that will be explored as I continue production on the actual comic.
Reflection:
A lot of the creation of my initial storyboard was incredibly messy, the few pages of that I've put above still leaves a lot to be desired, especially with the scenes that lack content at all because I hadn't completely decided on whether to have a completely chronological order of the narrative yet, or if I should take parts from different parts of the past 3 years that have the same energy - like 'events' like Halloween and New Year's Eve, and put them in the same page. One of the biggest elements that played a part in creating this draft was composition and my research in to the difference between traditional comics and webtoon styles. In my own comic, I've decided to combine those comic styles by using both structured panels and panels with no borders at all, of freeform subjects that overlap etc. It was quite hard for me to find a balance between these different sorts of panels without thinking of the possibility of the viewer's eye getting drawn in a way that doesn't fit the flow or pace of the comic. This is all subject to change as I get later into production of each page and have the freedom to move around each panel accordingly without redrawing an entire scene.
For now, I'm very happy with my storyboard as it combines a lot of elements, subject matter and it will call for me to use a range of my different skills. Closeups of human subjects, anatomy, props, scenery, composition and colour palettes etc. There's a lot going on in this comic, it's not sparse for content at all and yet I've made it so that it's not overwhelming to look at. Keeping space between some panels and overlapping others to speed up the pacing. Utilising things like polaroids as small panels, making references to art that inspires me and famous pieces like "The Creation of Adam" to symbolise identity and the creation of identity etc. If I were to do this another time I would do it differently by drawing each panel in a standalone infinitely scrolling webtoon style, where each panel is by itself, and if I didn't like that I would save each panel indivudally and then reorganise it in a bigger canvas to create it into a more traditional comic page. I don't know if I intend to make more comics in the futre, but these first steps of making one have felt vital.
COLOUR PALETTES & SUNSETS
Before actually going into creating my clean panels, I took a page out of the book of colourists and created a rough draft of a colour script. I looked into colour scripting and the impact of colour in a story more extensively on my research page, but it's in this part of my production that it actually came into play for the first time. In my FMP for last year, I also intended to create a colour script but I ran out of time to put any thought into my colour choice altogether by the end, so this project feels more like the result of two projects worth of colour psychology research, rather than one. As described beforehand, my colour palette is a big part of my comic and it's something with a lot of thought put into it, both symbolically and visually.
Before applying the colours directly to each panel, I made a palette for each page, each one representing a stage of the sunset. I laid them out in the way you see to the left here, my aim was to make the colour evolution consistent throughout each colour change regardless of the page difference. For example, the first colour of the first page progresses smoothly into the first colour of the second page, and that one progresses into the first colour of the third etc. This applies throughout each progression to each page, which took a lot of adjustments but itsgiven me a great baseline for the colour choices I'll base my characters off of.
In my comic, I want the colour palette to subtly progress to depict the evolution of a sunset - starting with the last of a blue sky settling into dusty pinks, progressing into light-driven pastel yellows and oranges, then gradually deepening in saturation to create warmer oranges and bright yellows, by the end darkening to blood orange contrasting with the intense shadows cast by the intense yellow sun of the end, representing the golden hour.
​That's the basis of the idea visually, but symbolically I've made this choice to use sunsets as a core tool of telling my story because they are so often representative of endings, but also proof that the end of something (in the case of a sunset, the end of the day; but in the context of my poem, the end of college) can be beautiful, finding solace in chaos.
The significance of a sunset (using this and this as sources) is common throughout human nature, when the sunset is a colourful display of warmth and golden light it's something that everyone documents, from photographers to regular people sending pictures to their friends, even those in the same geographical location who are experiencing the same thing, we all feel that urge to share the beauty we see in the world with others. But why is that? What makes a sunset so special is the fact that it's regularly ever the same in appearance, like snowflakes and fingerprints, each one is unique and unlikely to ever be seen in the same way again. On some days, there's no beautiful sunset at all, covered by layers of clouds obscuring the view of the sun, making the times where the sunset is visible much more impactful. From a psychology perspective too, the colours of a sunset naturally provoke joy and energy, yellow and orange being the most evident ones.
Sunsets are universal and connect us, even in a post-pandemic world. The sunset is a promise, it's always guaranteed to happen again, the sun sets on every day, meaning every bad day has an ending that can lead to the beginning of a better one. Sunsets represent completion, giving reason to give way to rest. It may not be the very next day, but it will eventually. This everyday occurrence is a reminder of the normalcy that can exist in our daily lives despite all of the chaos, and that's what my friends are to me; a reminder of the normality and comfort that can be present at all times, even when something clouds my better judgement I know that they're behind that fog. Additionally, in some African cultures, the sun setting and the moon rising is representative of a life cycle, from birth to adulthood to death before being reborn in the next sunrise. This cycle is endless and again conveys that feeling of security and normalcy.
Reflection:
Colour is such a vital part of how I plan to execute my idea and sunsets play a significant role in the symbolism present in my overall idea. As I learnt, in several cultures sunsets are representative of life cycles, rebirth, completion of tasks and of well earned rest. Sunsets are representative of the normality that can be found amongst the chaos of life, they're guaranteed and signify endings and how endings can be a positive thing, or at least beautiful. Colour scripting was something I've had a big interest in since my FMP from last year, so being able to finally enact those ideas I've had after the knowledge I've learnt over these two projects will surely make that effort more noticeable. There was some issues with making my colour palettes look different enough between each of my pages without being too big of a jump, but after using blending modes and lining up all of the different pages' colour palettes in rows and columns it made it easier to imagine how they'll look when applied to my panels. While my colour script is only a guide for the overall progression of my colour palette - pastel to saturated, cool to warm etc. - hopefully its full impact is fully known in my final results of the comic.
WATERCOLOUR STYLE
For my comic, there's a specific style that I wanted to employ to fully express the extent of how my digital art skills have been strengthened throughout this year, mostly to make up for the fact I'm not doing an animation this year for my FMP. The most interesting way I thought to do this via was by doing a digital watercolour style. Watercolour style illustrations are synonymous with creating nostalgic, dreamy or 'hazy', childhood-inspired scenes most commonly found in children's literature. The soft dilution of colours creates an appearance similar to that of the sky, making it even more fitting for the common thread of sunsets being a type of symbolism I intend to use in my comic. In addition to the colour palette itself going from being quite pale and pastel to bold and bright, I think the watercolour style will emphasise the progression further thanks to the diluted nature of it.
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However, I am a digital artist and watercolour is something predominantly done in traditional art, so this research I'm doing is intended to be done to teach me how I can replicate the elements of that style I like best in my art, digitally. Luckily, there's many artists who I'm specifically inspired by the creative process of who I can follow their tips by, as well as numerous YouTube tutorials on how to do the style I aim to do. I only intend to use these tutorials as a guide though, implementing my own twist because of the restrictions I have due to my software. Paint Tool SAI is a great tool for creating your own brushes and textures, but they can still be pretty limited unless you know how to upload your own textures etc. and experiment with settings accordingly.
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My biggest artistic inspiration for my overall digital painting (setting aside the watercolour aspect for a moment) style at the moment is @cherriielle across all platforms, Ella is a 21 year old artist who posts a mix of fanart and original art in a style that blurs the line between being painted and having linework. Her process is especially interesting to me because of the fact she uses the same software as me, making it feel more like her style is achievable, and that her tutorials apply to me!
When analysing Ella's style, it's important break it down into smaller parts of the work. For example, in the beginning of the speedpaint we can see that she starts her painting by having a relatively clean sketch, and blocking in the base colours over the top of it - the initial colours may look dull initially, but we see later how this is rectified.
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After those key colours have been laid down, she goes in with slightly darker tones to block in those first main shadows in the face, hair and wings to create some initial depth. This is done in a very cell shaded manner, not yet fully stepping into the traditional painting style that calls for blended brushstrokes across colours. After this she softens those cell shaded parts only slightly to make them still a stark contrast to the rest of the piece but noticeably blended. She tends to work one area of the subject at a time, focusing on the hair and going between only two brushes to create the shadows and highlights, blending more of the cell shading and then adding more painterly style brushstrokes over the top.
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It's after this she moves onto the skin, the style even more abundantly, and purposefully, cell shaded. It's also important to note that the sketch underneath is not visible at all until this moment where she flashes it on the screen to then paint in her own version of linework, leaving some parts fully without linework to further push the painting style. Her shading looks simple on the surface, but it's done with confidence and she really pushes her lights and darks to create harsh lines, and yet blend specific elements of her piece together without it looking muddy or without details getting lost. She takes darker, more saturated tones and accents them in the key points where shadows could get lost and pushes them to give the illusion of linework once again.
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Her art is sharp, but still keeps that softness to it that is prominent in most digital paintings, harsh lines being softened with the illusion of linework done in only slightly darker tones to the base colour. This is then furthered by her use of colour overlays later in the speedpaint, a key element of my own creative process but one I'll have to put a lot of thought into throughout this project for the sunset progression symbolism and colour palette to fully come across the way I intend it.
Further researching into Ella's blog, I found the brush she uses most often in her digital paintings and this set me up for some first hand experience drawing the way she draws. Since I found this brush, it's been almost the only one I've used when making digital paintings in the style I'm trying to create for this project. Below are some examples of how I've used it.
Without the visual aid of the speedpaint, Ella's digital art feels unreal in a truly dreamy way, the way she utilises colour and shape to create such dynamic pieces without shying away from harsh lines or dramatic lighting is something that inspires me greatly. The way she colours something that I adore, but it's also something I'll have to work my way around for the sake of fitting to my colour theme. Additionally, the harshness of the linework, or lack thereof, is something I may have to adapt to capture that more hazy, watercolour feel which relies on its dilution and dispersion when done in traditional art.
Above is my very first attempt of painting in the style that Ella does, which I think is very evident. This piece went unfinished as it was only a brief experiment, but it's a visual representation of where I was coming from. Back in 2018 - 2019 I did a lot of digital paintings, but they were often muddy or unpainted in places or just overall just attempts at realism rather than an attempt of a stylised painting. This was my first time attempting a style like this in a couple years and I think that comes across. The anatomy and overall style just doesn't feel like "me" at all but the shading and lighting I did felt so flat and lifeless unlike what I wanted to depict.
To the right is a more recent attempt of a digital painting style, but this time it was actually done in my style, just taking elements of Ella's process and introducing them into my own. This was done as a paid commission for a close friend of mine and it was the most fun I probably have ever had creating a full body piece, it has a lot of small details I had to consider and the complications of hair, hands and clothing are hard ones to overcome but it felt entirely worth it.
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This attempt felt much more successful because it's still obviously my style, just painted and I think it turned out great. I think the lighting was pushing me in an entirely new direction and while I think it doesn't fully remain consistent on the legs and boots, I'm especially proud of how it came out on the face and the right arm, I felt like I got the clothing creases just right whereas in other places I feel like I went a bit overboard on colouring.
Another artist who has the same sort of style I want to implement within my own comic is Jauni, known by @tofublock on platforms like Twitter. They're a fulltime student, but spends a lot of their time making illustrations like the ones pictured here. They have a big emphasis on environments that evoke feelings of being unreal in a wholly dreamy sense, colours of the sky, clouds and water being pushed beyond any semblance of realism and yet creating atmospheres full of warmth and depth.
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A lot of the content that documents their creative process is behind the paywall of their Patreon, made to help support them as a student acting like a tip jar of sorts. I didn't have any funds to put into my research for this topic despite it being an important part of what will make my comic what it is, so I wasn't able to afford supporting the artist while gaining access to their more detailed process of making art. From the surface level though, I could see first from their Twitter that they use the same software as I do (Paint Tool SAI) though they noticeably had a much lower stabiliser setting than I usually use. It was also plain to see how a lot of elements of their art would have a similar process to Ella's, whose art I looked into earlier. A lot of the brushstrokes are the same in texture, so we could make the assumption that most of their pieces are done using only a couple different brushes.
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Additionally, their colouring style is very similar to Ella's in the way that they push the focus onto dramatic, highly saturated light sources and highlights, and a lot of the brushstrokes are left perfectly visible creating a purposefully somewhat messy or painterly style. This is something often seen in actual watercolour paintings as the watercolour bleeds out, creating interesting textures and overlaid brushstrokes to make something look more solid than fuzzy.
For my final piece of research into this specific style, I looked into an artist who focused on human subjects so that I could gain insight on what the process of what traditional watercolour (or Gouache, in this case, but has similar results to what my intended style would look like) painting actually looks like from beginning to end. The artist I chose for this research was Dishashr, and what I learnt from them is that it's a medium that definitely makes you have to trust the process and be sparing with the amount of colour you use. Watercolour is something that relies heavily on layering your colours in order to create strong contrasts of light and dark. Because you can always add more watercolour to increase the shadows, but it's much harder to take away the shadows in a place where you want a stark highlight.
This is something much more easily avoided in digital art as it can always be redone, but the use of layers is very different in digital software in comparison to traditional. When using layering in digital art, each layer is independent of each other and colours or brushstrokes don't tend to blend together across layers unless that's an option already presented in the tools of your software, or if those two layers are merged together. The workaround for this is to either treat your digital canvas like that of a traditional one, being sparing with your colours and layering using only one layer but building upon the base colours you have down and so on etc. however, something that improve the success of this technique is to save your piece often as different files, so that you can always go back to a previous version of your piece if you can't ctrl + z back to before you did a new layer of colour that you didn't like the results of. This makes it so you can go back and attempt it in a different way pretty easily!
Reflection:
As such a key element of the visual appearance of my comic, researching into the different interpretations and versions of executing a watercolour style was vital to making decisions on how to use this style while also retaining the elements of my pre existing art style that makes it recognisably mine. In this research I looked into both digital painting and traditional watercolour, or gouache, which ended up being a big inspiration for the way I would layer my colours and build up the tones to create different 'planes' of my subjects, creating more depth. I would say that looking into my favourite digital painters was my favourite part of this research, because the artists I looked into most extensively were artists who used the same software as me, which made the techniques and processes they used for specific effects much more applicable to my own art.
Additionally, because of them using the same software, their terminology like the specific blending layer types, as well as the brushes they used, were ones I was able to directly try out for myself. One of the biggest things I learnt from the digital artists specifically was the cell shaded nature of a lot of digital paintings that I hadn't noticed before, not everything blends perfectly into each other and that makes the forms much more defined without looking out of place. Harsh lighting and lines exist in the real world, learning that not everything has to bleed into the other parts of a piece is a big realisation and help that allows me to not make my paintings as muddy.
ENVIRONMENTAL ART PHOTO STUDY & EXPERIMENTS
A lot of my art, including the majority of the subject matter that will be in my comic, focuses on interactions between human figures and the skills and style that sort of subject matter calls for is much different to that of environments. As I was researching into one of my biggest inspirations for the overall style I want to use in my comic, Jauni, an artist whose specialism is in those dreamy, scenic environments, I thought I would use a piece of their art to first do a study where I try and recreate a piece of theirs. However my aim would be to not make it a complete copy, but instead take note of the colours and shape they use, and then do it in my own style of watercolour, utilising both the techniques I have noticed in their work and in Ella's. After this I'll then use the skills I picked up during the initial study and use a few pictures from my own personal life to create some environmental pieces that I can then either use in my comic, or recreate later in a more simplified way to then be included in my comic.
THE ORIGINAL
MY ATTEMPT
Starting a piece that feels as big and complicated as this can feel very daunting, art and photo studies are both things I have avoided as much as I can for the longest time. And while it hasn't been detrimental to the progression of my art over the years, it's something that could have sped up my progression so much further if I had taken the time to hone in on those fundamental skills. The first thing I did though was create a grid over the original piece and impose that onto a new canvas of the same size so that I could be certain I was getting the size and distance of certain features as close as possible rather than going based off of my eye. This type of study can be criticised though as it can come off as copying the original piece exactly. While that isn't my intention, I don't think trying to copy a piece is a bad thing as it can still teach you a great deal about that artist's process and how they colour for example.
A big part of this study was to work in layers, bear in mind I had the grid visible while doing all of these layers but removed it for the sake of these final images. I first started on the sky because it felt like such a focal point of the scene. I used Photoshop for this piece as I didn't have access to Paint Tool SAI on the college mac, and this meant I wasn't able to implement the use of my own brushes and how adjusted I am to SAI, but it was a learning experience in how I could adjust my style to make it applicable to Photoshop. Blending is extremely hard in Photoshop, and I used only one brush as it was the most similar to the textured look I was aiming for. To blend, I colour picked directly from different parts of the sky in the original piece to simulate a gradient in a more painted style. I went back over this later to soften and smoothen it.
The next stage I did was the path, relatively monochromatic at first glance but bursting with different sheens of grey, ones that look purple and orange when paired alongside the others, but look flat and uninteresting by themselves. This is where shape started to play a part in the scene but as shown by the layer itself, it was very messy and soft to make room for additional layers over the top.
This is where the piece really began to take form with the addition of the differently toned yellow greens of the grassy plains and the varied hues of the horizon line of houses and hills alike creating a further depth and an element of the unknown in the piece. Again, as this was done in Photoshop I found it incredibly frustrating to create texture in the grass, not having the time or patience to create more refined blades but not wanted it to look muddy and formless.
Next is when I added both the railroad tracks (though in my own piece they look very little like railroad tracks, as creating smooth lines with the awful stabiliser in Photoshop was near impossible and I settled for keeping it more stylised and cartoonish to make up for it.) and the trees, in this progress image the trees are very soft and formless and their shading is very splotchy and inconsistent but I find that messy painting style has enough appeal to be endearing if done correctly, which I think I could have achieved if I had more knowledge of Photoshop's brushes and how to use them effectively.
Next I added some very slight details to the foreground, though hardly noticeable and if I had given myself more creative freedom, I think I would have approached them differently or make them more noticeable entirely in the way of blurring the foreground to emphasise the distance between them and the background etc. But it would also be hard to keep that painterly style noticeable if it were blurred I find so this is something I intend with experimenting within the process of creating my own comic.
To finish off when I got home from college, I opened the last saved version of the file I had which meant all the layers had been compressed (since I couldn't save the .PSD as a .SAI file) and this made it harder to work on each part individually, but I added some smaller details to tie the piece together using the brush I will be using to create my own comic. I rendered the piece a bit more, most noticeably the sky, and added the stop sign and tree stump that I had previously neglected to add. As well as some sparkles and stars to both the foreground and sky. I didn't end up adding the cat and dog as I felt it more apt to keep this study to being exclusively an environmental study, but I hope to do more studies like this where I really commit to creating all of the details in my own style.
Images of my brush settings and the separated layers within Photoshop. I used one of the default brushes as I'm not very used to the brushes in Photoshop, it was very difficult to blend colours as the brush I was using didn't have a lot of blending properties within it, but I kept my forms and shapes easily recognisable so that I could blend them together easier later in Paint Tool SAI with brushes I was used to.
Reflection:
I feel like this piece of experimentation was very impactful on my project going forward, however it also felt like an experiment that fell short on several occasions. To start with, I wasn't able to use the same software that I intend to make my comic in which made me feel like the skills I had learnt while doing the art study wouldn't be entirely applicable to my usual toolset. However, reflecting on it more positively I know that learning about one of my favourite artist's processes and trying to apply that to a program I have never made a full piece in before, let alone a study of someone else's piece, was a great challenge and I do genuinely like the result. I wish I had pushed myself more to include the cat and dog as the final detail because I really liked how in the original piece there was this cell shaded quality to how they looked and how they fit into the scene so seamlessly. If I did this again, I would definitely take more artistic liberties; I think using the grid to map out my colours was great, but I felt like I had to make everything perfect and have it be a carbon copy of the original rather than be authentic to my own style. This art study did make me feel like I could be much more "interesting" with my colour choice though - some of the original artist's colours making no sense until I blended them into the next and them working so seamlessly was so fun to see and it inspires me greatly to incorporate more interesting colour palettes into my work.
FORMATTING A PAGE
After creating the sketches for my panels and their borders, I went forward with finalising the format of them with linework using a textured, crayon type brush preset. This made the lines I did using the linework tool (which helped significantly in making sure my lines were straight) lot a lot more freehanded and lively than they otherwise would have with a plain untextured brush. In comparison to the sketches, my final boxes made the pages look much more like traditional comics by the use of boxes and utilising leading lines throughout the panels to lead the viewers eye through the page. For a lot of the pages they are comprised mostly of rectangles as they allow for a lot of content to be shown and lend themselves nicely to scenes with landscapes or more characters.
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To create some more visual interest though, in the later pages I implemented more diagonal lines as this sped up the pace in helped to connect two panels together regardless of how different in appearance they were. This was the same case with the triangles in the bottom half of page four, the panels themselves have a very minimal bottom border and no border on the sides, making the drawings that will go in those spaces much more freeform and provides more breathing room after the top half of the page.
Another choice I really liked in formatting this comic was the landscape panel in the middle of both page one and five, having subtle differences such as page five not having any horizontal borders, feeling less restricted and giving room for more scenery to full immerse the viewer into the panel. The first page with the middle landscape box in comparison is limited by its borders and boxed in by other panels on the top, bottom and overlapping with it, making it feel much more suffocating.
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Finally, going from the 2nd to last page to the last page I've decided to have a pull back and reveal, having the last panel of the 2nd to last be a close up preview of a different point of view of the last one, where in the last page the panel takes up the full space of the page. I'm undecided right now on whether to keep the borders to the last page or not, as if I don't include the borders it may make the page feel more complete, and yet still leaves more of the scene to be unimagined, outside of the borders that the viewer isn't privy to the viewing of. It symbolises the unfinished nature of this story, of how there's still more to come. The idea of this panel making up the whole page adds onto this, it emphasises the vastness of the world, and the memories my friends and I featured in the comic haven't made yet. This last page is purely for them and to show, despite the small section of the panel that we will take up in comparison to the background, that we have so much more to experience and we'll be going through it together.
Reflection:
I'm overall pretty happy with how the majority of my comic's layout is now, it has ended up very different from the initial sketches I did of my boxes but I believe this was for the best because it means my panels no longer look as disjointed from each other and flow more smoothly from one into the next. The main tool I used for this was the linework tool within Paint Tool SAI as this allowed me to create "templates" for straight lines going vertically and horizontally that I could copy and paste and position to make into boxes that were evenly spaced and parallel with each other when necessary. A problem I came across was my boxes feeling too stiff and lifeless, but the thing that helped to fix this was using a more textured brush when going over the linework tool's template. In the end, the boxes lineart will be coloured to fit the scene they're bordering but the additional 'shaping' of the boxes helped create a much more lively appearance. If I were to do this differently, I would have implemented a range of more different comic panel layouts to experiment with the pacing further and push my storytelling abilities across the scenes. I had to neglect a few of the elements I wanted to include to have time in order to complete the pages I already had formatted, but if in the future if I make more comics I'll be sure to utilise more of the skills this project has helped me to learn.
MAKING A PANEL
To start with I followed the sketch pretty closely to create the linework, but kept it very soft and with less detail than I would usually put into my art to compensate for how small the panel would be when alongside multiple others, I kept the lines quite thin but with a high density to make it more clear where I would need to paint over.
Next I added the flat colours on a layer underneath the linework, when making these initial colour choices I made a note to make the colours more pastel and desaturated than usual, but notably not applying the same logic to the red hair as it draws focus, making it more easy to follow that character, me, in the narrative throughout the pages. I also kept these colours desaturated because of the additional colour altering blending modes i would later add.
After this is when I added the first initial shading and aspects of the digital painting style to my subjects, going in to create soft shadows, but still having a cell-shaded appearance that bled out into the surrounding colours. An important aspect of this was including a transitional colour between the base colour and shading colour, something more obviously different and saturated to create an illusion of further softness. The shading is not too noticeable here, but is emphasised at a later stage.
This step is where the painting style really comes into reality, starting with me painting on the linework layer from before (with it on 'Protect Alpha' so that I wouldn't be drawing outside of the lines) to match the colours (or slightly darker) that have been laid underneath to create a blend and soften the silhouettes of the characters, but still trying to keep the shapes and subjects noticeable.
At first glance, this appears to be the biggest jump in the drawing's appearance but once broken down its just two processes I went through. The first being to add more detailed rendering to my subjects by painting more liberally on a layer above the linework in the same colour as the painting to make a seamless blend from the colours to the edges, additionally I added more dramatic highlights and lowlights to create depth in places like the clothing creases.
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The other process was adding the colour overlays. This is where the colour swatches I made before came into play, using the swatch of my first panel as a 60% overlay layer, then further softening the final piece by having a light yellow colour on 11%, then duplicating that layer and setting it to multiply and 36%.
In this final stage, I added the last few details that made the painted style more obvious, such as utilising a textured brush I have and using it to make the painting more 'fuzzy' and visually interesting, additionally I added some more rendering like more wispy hair, some additional highlights with the textured brush and some particles with the swatch colours surrounding the subjects.
Reflection:
Considering the fact this process is one that I'll have to repeat throughout my entire comic, it's relatively simple and was easy to break down into well defined stages that I can follow in the future. A problem I ran into is that I wasn't able to go back and have a layer of the linework as it originally look, so in the pictures of my process I had to substitute it by desaturating the colours of the flat coloured version of the drawing, up the contrast to get rid of the the grey that was within the lines and did 'luminance to transparency' to create a layer of the lineart by itself as close as I could get it to the original. The most fun part of this process for me was figuring out the textured brush I would use at the end to make the drawing more interesting and less flat looking. This was a part I was debating whether I should go through with it or not, but I'm glad I did as it only took a couple minutes and was a relatively loose process. At the moment I can't think of anything I would change about this process, but potentially I could change some things to this process as I go throughout my comic, such as using noise overlays to add more of a textured appearance etc.
BUILDING A PAGE
For my entire comic I'm working in stages, first by lining out all of the boxes for every page so that I had the basic skelton of my idea visually laid out for me, as this then made fitting my already made sketches into the composition of the smaller panels much more easy. After this is when I did all of the linework for the comic one page at a time, as I felt that just focusing completely on one page at a time by doing boxes, lineart, colour, effects, captions, hen going onto the next page to repeat the same process from the beginning could cause some discrepancies in my style, the progress of the colour palette shifting from pastel to saturated and overall storyline. Once I had finished the linework, I implemented the colour palette swatches from earlier to fit neatly into each panel's borders to give a clearer idea of what stage the colour palette should be at in that time of the comic.
After I had completed the linework it was time for me to do colouring, arguably the part of my art process that can make or break the overall feel, emotion, composition and style of the comic itself. As my style for this comic is intended to be very gouche or watercolour like, the lineart becomes disguised in between the colours I paint over it so it's important that I get the colours true to what I had in mind with the swatches and utilise them so that their impact is shown in the final version of the pages. To start with, I selected everything outside of my characters including the backgrounds within each panel, I then inverted this so that only the characters were selected. After this I filled everything I had already selected with a base colour. This page is one I did quite late in production, and in turn I was cutting it close with the deadline and therefore cutting corners for the sake of working efficiently. However, this process I took on while working on this page was one I wish I used the whole time. I worked in stages, one layer dedicated to the skin, which after I had filled with the base colour I went back over with the additional blush and shading etc. and then another layer for everyone's hair.
When the main colouring is complete, I begin painting over the previously done linework to blend it in with the colouring I've just done. I then keep going by rendering out the smaller details with finer brushstrokes of a textured brush to bring back the nostalgic dreamy-hazy feel that the blended colours bring. At the same time as this, I add smaller highlights and details like light particles and lighting if the scene calls for it. My intention is always to keep the scenes true to the environments they actually take place and keep their integrity. The colour shifts that happen with the swatches I use as templates for my panels means this may get lost and I need to find a way to work around it accordingly, mostly so my subjects don't blend into the background surrounding them.
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The last step I take with any panel is to paint over it's borders. While the black borders can work well, especially for a black and white comic, but as this is a comic that is heavy on colour and having a painted look to it, painting the borders to look like they and the panel itself are one in the same is a cool effect, it makes my characters feel like they're popping out more of the screen.
FILMMAKING
Outside of art in the digital illustration sense, I've for a long while been interested in amateur filmmaking and all the elements to go into making video diary, short movie or "vlog" that create a specific feeling. This has naturally extended into including my friends in these experiments of visual storytelling outside of comics and digital art, exploring how I can structure small moments and memories into a finished product. With the context and inclusion of my friends, I'm already given many ideas of what sort of feeling to construct. In most cases, this results in something similar to a home movie. A lot of this is done in post production by using various free effects in the program I default to using, Davinci Resolve, and colour correcting (as well as audio editing). It's similar to the final stages of me finalising a panel or comic page, the effects acting as the rendering I do to my finished pieces, and the colour grading being very similar to the mix of blending mode layers I use on my drawings to create different atmospheres.
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The reason I mention this hobby of mine at all in the first place is because of how it can tie into what scenes I include in my comic, as well as giving explanation and reasoning behind the references for my panels, a lot of which are from these 'home movies' of sorts I've made of my friends and I. In my videos I utilise common filmmaking tips, I experiment predominantly with composition and perspective a lot to further emphasise specific emotions. And speaking of my friends, as they are such a vital part of this hobby of mine it made sense to mention it for a project where they are the focus. I'm only a hobbyist filmmaker, I don't make things with a plan or have a storyline or script or plot involved, all I do is record the small beautiful moments I have with people I love and stitch them all together to create a video scrapbook of our memories. This comic is the same way, it's not fully linear but it's a patched together compilation of why my college years have been so special and it's things like the reappearances of characters, changes in appearance and the poem's captions that will help to progress the story and convey the passing of time.
When putting one of these videos together, I start by chronologically adding all of the videos I plan on including into my timeline so that they're already in the order I want all of the clips to appear in, this makes it so I'm not jumping back and forth between different moments and gives an idea of a definite timeline of events, even if they are just small and inconsequential as this isn't something genuinely plot driven. After this is where I go through each of the aforementioned raw video files in the timeline and use the split tool to isolate all of specific moments of all of them (keeping in mind the original videos were around 10 to 20 minutes in length) and deleting the rest of the footage if it wasn't as interesting. My main aim with these videos is to always ensure that everyone who was involved has a moment where they feel like the focus, using my understanding of how a character's on-screen time can play into their appeal in fictional media still holds value in real life scenario. I want to make everyone feel included and like they contribute "enough" simply by existing. These videos are sometimes the best way I can think of to do that.
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It's after all of my favourite clips have been isolated that I usually go in to the timeline to manually line them up to the general tempo of the song I choose to play in the track underneath, this usually means having to trim some of the clips I'd chosen to include, but it in the end creates a very cohesively and tightly edited sequence. The understanding of pacing and timing that is relevant to art and animation and comic making still comes into play here, just in different ways. I wouldn't consider myself a good filmmaker by any means, but I create these videos for myself and my friends, they don't have to perfect or polished and that's the same attitude I'm using for making the comic.
The biggest part of making my amateur short film style scrapbooks is the colour grading, and there's so many tutorials for various effects you can implement and how-to's on how to make your footage look like it's from.a certain era or even mcopy another movie's exact colour profile onto your own footage. I have to use the free version of Davinci Resolve, which does mean I'm quite limited on the tools and the amount of effects I can use, but I've found my own workarounds to create a very handheld-camcorder, warm and fuzzy, nostalgic style of editing that I can use across my full timeline so that they all match in the vibe.
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The first thing I did was add the box blur effect, it instantly created a blur that completely erased all visual details like facial features and even general positions. To modify this so that it was this semi-transparent blur that bloomed outward slightly, I turned down the strength (which made the radius of the blur smaller), made the number of iterations the highest it would go so that the box blur would have the smoothest transition from most blurred to least. Lastly I lowered the blend, which was the opacity in this case of the effect, so that it would still have a visible blur and almost create a fuzzy silhouette around everything without disregarding the details. After this, the main effect I added was film damage, which added some additional blur, slightly shifted the temperature of the footage and added animated dirt particles and lines as if it was actually filmed on an old film camera.
The last thing I did was the actual colour correcting. In order to not affect the other effects applied to all of the clips I did the colour grading on a separate node (the small boxes all connecting from one end, to each other, to the other end.) I did this with the other effects like the blur and film damage too, them all being on independent nodes that I could switch off or alter without the other effects being warped. For the colour correcting I kept it generally simple, though I did look into several tutorials to find out how to do different types of 'film colour grading' (a popular one being the 'orange and teal' look.) The parts I altered are highlighted; this being the lowered contrasted, increased saturation, slight hue shift to make the footage more warm, a decrease in shadows and highlights to reinforce the darks after the contrast had washed their details out. I didn't touch the actual colour wheels themselves at all, feeling it made the footage look too edited. With video editing, less tends to be more and this is something I need to keep in mind for my digital art too instead of relying on layers of different effects to fix a 'bad' piece.
Here are two stills I grabbed from the edited video, one with all of the visual editing and effects turned off, and the other with them turned on. The visual difference is clear to see instantly. It's especially evident in the difference of colours, the slight haziness and the white dust speckled across the screen of the edited version. I was very happy with how this editing turned out despite being on a time crunch to complete the video before one of my best friend's birthdays, but I still wanted to experiment more with colouring and that's when I followed a tutorial to see just how different a scene could look while using different effects and colour grading At first this experiment may seem pointless as it doesn't directly line up with what I'm creating for my comic, but it's the learning about film techniques, colour theory/psychology and the implementation of composition or perspective or timing that are prevalent in both art forms and finding the bridge between them will surely benefit my final comic.
As one of the most commonly used colour grading settings, I decided to try my hand at creating the teal and orange film effect that is seen so prevalent in movies like Joker and Mad Max Fury Road. Its intention is to draw focus to the warmer tones of a scene which are most usually the skin colour of any human subjects, contrasting them strongly with a cool hued background. I thought this would be the best one for me to experiment with trying as my comic is so character-focused and I want the viewer's eye to be on the characters more than the scenes they're placed within. Following along with a tutorial though, I found that my footage would simply refuse to become an in between of green or blue, a teal colour didn't fit in the scene at all and so I left it more blue.
To create this effect in Davinci Resolve, I relied on the Colour tab that allowed me again to create nodes to edit the colourgrading of parts of a scene independently of other effects. The first thing I did was colourpick my subject's skin colour and adjusted the hue, saturation and luminance sliders until most colours alike to skin tones were highlighted. After this, I invented my selection so that I had everything outside of my subject's skin selected and it's at this point I tried to add the cooler hues into the background using the 'offset' colour wheel. Once I had done this though I found that a lot of my shadows weren#t clean at all and had blue where I didn't want them to. To fix this, I used the lum & sat curve to adjust the shadows so that they were devoid of colour completely to make up for the abundance of blue in them from before.
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After creating the blue effect, I wasn't happy with how dull the skin was in comparison. In the tutorial I followed the instructor said that the skin would be orange enough in comparison to the cool hues we had just added prior but this wasn't the case for my footage. To compensate, I inverted my selection once again so I had just the skin selected, on a new node so that I wasn't affecting the colours of the blue outside of the skin, and I upped the saturation and pushed the offset in to the orange. As seen above in the after shot though, the difference between where the skin is selected and where it couldn't be detected is clear. While a cool style choice, it isn't as smooth as I would've liked it to be. Overall though, I'm proud of this experiment and I think further looking into filmmaking will be good inspiration for my scenes if I make more comics on the future.
POSE REFERENCES
As often as I can, I've been trying to create and use my own references when drawing in order to push myself to find solutions when I'm unable to find pictures of poses from certain angles online. However, when I'm not able to replicate the pose I want with the angle necessary due to not having proper camera equipment, a set, props or lighting etc. the other alternative I've found is to use online pose models with easily manipulated body parts, camera angles and even lighting all within my browser. I tried out two different ones to compare the differences and identify which one gave me a more realistic reference for what I needed it for.
The first of the two I used was justsketch.me. While it was a good baseline model to use, especially for creating strong lines of action and creating the skeleton of a pose, its proportions were more alike that of an anime art style which isn't what I'm going for. For references I rather they be as realistic to human proportions as possible so that I can get those right, before then stylising them myself. This model's proportions were exaggeratedly feminine and the face lacked facial features. However, this model has a range of nodes to adjust, including the fingers which made it good enough for creating a dramatic pose and angle.
The second option I tried out for finding a free online pose model was posemy.art. This one supplied a much larger range of models to use and these ones employed the use of much more realistic human proportions and even detail on the face which helped greatly with how to draw the face from a below angle tilting away from the camera. The lighting function also worked better in this pose model space because the model was greyscale, and the background plains surrounding it were darker. This one was a bit more finicky to use as there were many axis for the limbs to move on and twisting them would sometimes break the model and make it look as if the skin were twisted wrong. This didn't happen in the other pose model as that one didn't use any sort of human physics. While this one having them made it harder to use, it made me more precise about my posing.
FIRST PAGE
For each of the panels I followed the same process as the one I detailed above. So far I've tended to work on one panel at a time, because it allows me to better match the colours of the panel to the swatch of the sunset palette that it aligns with in the progression. As the colour palette and the way the palette develops is such a key part of this comic, it's important to me that my intentions with it are visually evident. Additionally to this, working on them one at a time allows me to construct a loose timeline of the events. For example in this first page it's a documentation of my first year and meeting the original friend group that would grow to be what it is now, then jumping to both my past and present in the last three frames; going from me in childhood to me on NYE in 2021 nearing the end of our third year.
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After I had completed the visual part of my first page I went into FireAlpaca to try to construct a draft of the appearance of the poem's captions, none of it is final right now but I did it to get a general feel of how it would flow with the captions accompanying it. What I especially liked is how the caption in the wide angle panel in the middle of the page is split up, further making the pace slow down to be taken in. It centres the character in the piece and frames them to draw the viewer's eye. Another idea I like the look of is the inclusion of overlapping the captions with the actual panels, it gives a sense of connection that. flows all throughout the page as one line of poetry flows into the next. For the sake of simplicity I kept the font as Arial and added some edge borders to make them standout more from the panels, but in the final version I intend on utilising a font of my own handwriting to give off the sense that this comic is very personal and handmade.
I'm overall quite pleased with how my first page has turned out so far, the progression of colours from pastel to more saturated is already more noticeable however I feel I could adjust this more to make it potentially more subtle across panels so that the progression doesn't go to rapidly before it gets to the pages that actually should be saturated. I think it was quite effective to do one panel at a time, however I think it would speed up my process a lot in future pages if I focus on completing all of the linework first, then go in with colouring each panel by itself to maintain the slow progression of the colour scheme. An artistic choice I'm very proud of is the use of the textured 'crayon' style brush I have started going in with in the final stages of a panel as it results in the image looking so much more alive and gives room to make it look intentionally unpolished. A problem I have ran into several times is with the final look of the panels not matching up with the colour palette swatches I planned out beforehand for them. However, I fixed this by utilising more blending modes for each layer and adjusting their contrast and brightness to make them lighter and more pastel coloured. If I were to do this page again, I think I would exaggerate how noticeable the original colour palette swatches are by making the scenes as a whole more monochromic in alignment with that swatch. If I have time I'll try to alter this page before the end of the project to rectify this, but if not I'll try to do it in the next pages.
SECOND PAGE
The second page is much like the first, however it focuses longer on the shift from first year to second year of college, including brief moments of the summer we had in between lockdowns. The fact the pandemic happened is not obvious at first glance of my comic, but the jump in time from first year to starting second year and the months that follow make it more evident. In this page is where I began to add smaller details like particles outside of the borders and make a reference in the first panel to the first Christmas gifts I had ever bought my friends after knowing them for a few months. We didn't know at the time that our friendships would last this long and go on so strong, and so these gifts of Steven Universe pins have come to represent a bit of our origins. I tried to focus on more depth with my scenery in this page, using a multiply layer over characters who are further away from the forefront, creating a drop shadow behind two figures against a wall, blurring the bowling ball in the foreground and having the rest of the alley in focus.
The addition of Dax to our friend group is the most easy to spot narrative arc that happens over this page, us meeting him to going out of college together, to coming back from lockdown after interacting with the other class over Discord who shared our love for Minecraft, to being outside of college together again out of choice. The progression of the colour palette in this page was tricky to me, progressing from red to yellow but it looking less happy and saturated and more washed out and autumnal despite this page taking place mainly in the spring and summer. This page is also where I started being more generous with the amount of light particles I allowed to show up, finding that they looked a lot like lens flares and that they added a cinematic feel to the panels.
THIRD PAGE
This page is one that gave me a lot more problems than the others, it always felt like it had way too much white space and not enough content to make up for it. The colours looked washed out and the backgrounds felt very lifeless and untextured and this was something I struggled to fix as I was less than a week from the deadline. Some panels look more out of place than others and the colours of the bed are completely off to me, but it also matches the progression of the colour palette so I learnt to make the best of how it looked. Most of these scenes were taken directly from images I had from across the summer of 2021 and reinvented into a more painted art style.
I'm not as proud of this page as the others but I'm very proud of how the polaroid mini panels turned out. One big issue I had was mistakenly merging the borders underneath my panels and being unable to go back far enough to undo it, this completely threw off my workflow and i wasn't sure how I was going to fix it until I found a backed up FireAlpaca file of when I was doing test caption layers, and in that file was the original borders that I re-overlayed onto the frames that had been messed up.
FOURTH PAGE
In terms of formatting this page was the most interesting despite perhaps being less complex. It's very simple geometric shapes and I left a lot of white space at the bottom behind my characters instead of doing more backgrounds as I felt it broke the page up nicely into three different sections (the two big panels at the top, the two across the middle and the three spliced along the bottom.) The most challenging part about this one was the amount of backgrounds I had to do, while also making those said backgrounds fit the colour scheme progression. In the first panel I struggled to create the effect of us taking a picture in a mirror, but by adding streaks of highlight it created a metallic glare or sheen that helped to convey that effect. In this page I also utilised the blur tool against to further imply motion, such as on the swingset, and to create a dreamier feeling across the other panels.
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The part that definitely took the longest was the Halloween panel, as drawing people not in their usual appearances and instead in their halloween costumes made it slightly harder to still imply that they were the same people. Additionally, with there being so many characters in one scene with different coloured clothes with different textures it felt difficult trying to make them seem like they were all apart of the same scene. Giving the free white space at the bottom of the page felt like a cop out of not drawing more backgrounds at first, however it's turned out to be very helpful as I would later have enough room to put my text in the free spaces given.
FIFTH PAGE
This is the page I would say I worked the most efficiently on despite it being the most content heavy, with every panel having a background behind it and multiple characters. A lot of this page was completed over the course of a single day, and it's turned out to be one of the most detailed ones and ones that I'm proud of. I believe this page the most out of all of the comic shows the full expanse of my sills with not only drawing people, but also environments now too. It's an entirely new realm of territory for me, especially as I had never drawn environments and gone on to do them in a digitally painted style that didn't end up incredibly messy.
However to my surprise my backgrounds in this page and across most of my pages turned out sharp and recognisable, again utilising tools to make lements pop such as blurring bright lights, particle effects, simulating gradients with a few hard brushstrokes of similar but gradually different colours. It's at this point that the small textured brushstrokes were becoming more of an afterthought in favour of keeping my art look as clean as usually and keeping the structural integrity of my characters. This is a decision that may make this page look inconsistent with the others, but I believe it shows off the actual style of my art much more faithfully.
SIXTH PAGE
And it's finally in this last page where the influence and impact of that environmental art study I did of that artist that inspired me is evident. If it weren't for that impromptu skills experiment I don't think I would have been able to create this scene and frame it the way it is now if it weren't for that practice. Creating a scene where me and all of the people who have shaped my college experience and who I've become are small in comparison to our wide expansive future ahead of us was important to me. I wanted to show that while we are so significant by ourselves as shown by the plethora of panels we take up all of the room in, we still have so much that we don't see, 'beyond the borders' so to speak. I wanted to make this composition as full of depth as possible, the sunset behind all of the figures haloing us and the hill rounding out a small amount of foreshortening the peak from the expanse that leads to the blades of grass in the very foreground.
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And this panel is a direct continuation of the last one in the page before, which is the only time this happens in this comic as otherwise the pace takes bigger jumps in order to show more of our memories together. In this instance, it serves to both create suspense and then it does a pull back and reveal to show off this final large panel, a large juxtaposition to all of the pages before it which were abundant in different panels.
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This panel was created over the course of a full day as the final thing I needed to do for me to be able to consider my production done with. I brought back the textured look a lot more with this panel, it cleverly disguising details I didn't add and bleeding all of the hands holding onto each other together. This whole page was a big task that I set myself from the very start of this project, and I almost thought I wouldn't get to do it, so the fact I did at all is something I'm very proud of because at the end of the day, it's a goodbye and a snapshot in time of who we all are right now, and who we'll never be again.
CUT PAGE + POETRY STANZA
THE FONT
Due to the fast approaching deadline, I did have to make some pretty big cuts to my final production in order ro get it done in the time I had while still retaining the integrity and meaning of all of these memories put together. I had made good progress on the page during the last week, but knowing how it took me whole days to finish a panel full of characters, it would be unrealistic on my part to be able to do that again with only days to go before I had to sign off and submit my project. The part of this that I struggled with the most houg hwas the knowing that cutting a comic page meant cutting a stanza of my poem, while on the surface this may not mean much, I felt like it disrupted the pacing of the story I had formed around of my college years and I felt it lost the repeated sentiment of home, and the references I make to specific instances in our friendships.
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Additionally, I felt like cutting out a page would be a disservice to my friends who hadn't been featured in the comic as much due to not being as involved in the group until more recently. However, I made up for this the best I could by adding smaller details back in other pages to include people who didn't get as much time in the comic as others. I want to make everyone in my friend group feel equally important and losing a page of my comic felt like it could make or break it. I do think this was a beneficial decision though, as I then got to reimplement a line of the lost stanza of the poem to a different page that it worked just as well in the context of.
The very final step It took with my comic was adding the poem in captions using FireAlapaca, as SAI has no text feature and FireAlpaca's had the option of adding an edge to my text which made it stand out much better and easier to read. The use of the font Cc Wild Words was also something that I didn't intend to happen though. I originally planned to make my own handwriting into a fond as it would feel more personal to me, however I found that I would just be trying to imitate this font that already existed. And with the deadline so close, I couldn't afford to spend any time painstakingly creating the perfect font for my comic. But in all honesty, I think this decision was for the best as I think the use of this font makes my project look much more convincingly like a comic.