More Pencils

I finished up the pencils for pages one and two of the six page mini-comic I'm doing for the comic workshop. There's really not a whole lot to say about them that I haven't already said about previous comic pages. I used the non-photo blue pencils for the roughs like I did with the one-page comic and, once again, when scanning in on greyscale, they magically disappear leaving only the regular pencils, so they're still working as advertised. So, without further ado, the pages!

Page one is basically a bridge from the four page mini-comic (links to page one, two, three and four, for those who are curious to review). Modified a few things from the thumbnails but otherwise not much to add, commentary-wise.

Tried to do some fancy perspective stuff to start off page two, but it's definitely off - not something I'm particularly experienced with. The cars are also out of proportion with respect to each other (at least) which is another thing I need to work on (and relative proportions of things in general.)

Anyway, with the comic workshop done for this term, there probably won't be any more comic-related things until we resume next year, though I'm going to try to get a head start on the next two pages over the holidays so that January's a little less busy.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Comic Filler

On the previous meeting for the comics workshop, we talked about panel composition and various considerations (conscious or otherwise) that go into laying out content within a panel. Comic artist Wally Wood came up with "22 Panels That Always Work" (or see video version here) as a sort of visual shorthand - of course, theres more than just 22 ways to compose a panel, but it's a nice reference if one is stuck for ideas.

One of our exercises was to re-design a panel from our mini-comic thumbnails based on our panel composition discussion. Here's the one that I did (from page 6):And the three alternate versions:
We've also been talking about developing characters, both in the literary sense and in regards to approaches and techniques to designing the visual look of a character. Even though I did the character design for my major characters in The Word Smith over the summer, this still gave me the opportunity to design the civilian attire for the hero and his sidekick and the new set of villains.This is a set of concept sketches exploring possible designs for The Word Smith's civilian look (I went with the middle one), with a more detailed model sheet below:For The Pen, I only did a set of concept sketches (because I was being lazy) with the final design that I used being a mix of the first and second sketches.Finally, I did a single sketch for each of the villains (basically fairly closely based on how they were drawn in the thumbnails) and no detailed model sheet since they're just one-offs, basicallyThe fact that there's three of them (like there were in the first mini-comic) is really just coincidental. Three just seems like a good number, though I could probably have cut one of them out without much difficulty.

Anywho! That's all for this time. The next post will probably have the pencils for the first two pages of the mini-comic.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Word Smith Take Two

So, that comic workshop I've been running has still been going, even through NaNoWriMo and stuff has been happening. We're in the final stretch, though the workshop is going to run into January since we've skipped a couple of weeks due to people being away and will be adding 2 or 3 extra weeks of material related to figure drawing and perspective when all is said an done. But that's not a bad thing! It gives me some extra time to get ahead on my homework, and I might need it. After the one-page comic, we've started in on the final sequence of homework assignments which tasks us with creating a 6 page mini-comic. I've told my workshop participants to do anywhere from a 2 to 6 page comic (and they're all doing 2 pages) but as the leader, and because I'm a little bit crazy, I decided to do the full 6 pages. Hey, why not?

In order to make things a bit easier on myself, I decided to do the next episode of the 4 page mini-comic I did over the summer - it avoids me potentially starting yet another project that I might feel tempted to do something about at some time in the future and avoided having to spend too much time coming up with a new idea whilst I was embroiled in NaNoWriMo. I was a bit hesitant to just follow-up the summer mini-comic though as it seemed like I'd be short circuiting the character design process a little bit, but in the end I still have to do character designs for peoples' civilian outfits and the new set of villains.

The first task, as before, was to create thumbnails. I did my thumbnails at 1/4 size on two sheets of paper (conservation ftw), pictured below.

Of course, the small size (and my handwriting) probably means the dialogue's not terribly legible, but I'll be posting thing full version as it gets completed. The current goal is to have the first two pages fully pencilled and lettered by Tuesday next week (currently have all the roughs done), so they'll be posted sometime after that; some character designs might go up between now and then.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

NaNoWriMo Post-Mortem

It's been nearly a week since I completed my NaNoWriMo project and the thought of it no longer turns me into a mass of quiver goo which means it's time for a post-mortem of the whole experience. Isn't that what you were waiting for? Sure it was. So lets go!

This was my first time participating in NaNoWriMo, though I didn't sign up on the official website as I didn't feel it was necessary for me personally. I did see on a blog somewhere that previous NaNoWriMos have had about a 20% success rate, though I don't know what the results are for this year. Food for thought, I suppose, or some indication that writing 50 000 words in a month is no small feat. Anyway, on to my personal experiences.

As I said previously, this was my first writing project of any significance outside of FASS since... oh, well, I'm not sure, really. For my writing adventure, I picked an idea that had been rolling around in the back of my head since sometime in 2004. Overall, I enjoyed the writing process, though it definitely started to feel like a bit of a slog at the end. I think that succeeding in NaNoWriMo requires a certain amount of discipline and pacing; I was able to stick to my daily writing schedule and that certainly helps. Even though I never really wrote much more than the minimum each day, it was still enough to let me finish a day early - a nice reward for sticking with things, I guess.

A plan also helps. This is one area where I could have used a bit more work. I had done a little bit of background writing over the summer and made a short outline to get me started, though it turned out to be not quite enough. The outline got me through the first six chapters (about 38 000) words with the last two chapters being made up as I went along. Ordinarily, I'd have stopped, thought about things a bit more and then continued, but NaNoWriMo doesn't really accomodate that very well. Fortunately, by the end of chapter six, things had enough momentum to keep going. Though I'm not too sure how much a significantly more detailed outline would have helped as unexpected things kept happening, things happened in ways I didn't anticipate and characters developed in ways I hadn't originally thought of. But that's good! I like that about writing and I think it's part of how I do these things, so having an overall premise in mind (which I did) while coming up with an outline in chunks and then filling in the details as I go and changing the outline as necessary seems to suit me. Naturally, others' clickage will vary.

Of course, a lot of what I wrote was probably crap, but quality is not the point of NaNoWriMo. The point, for me, was just to force myself to write something, regardless of quality or anything else. I've been wanting to try to writing a novel for a long time; it's one of those things that I keep thinking that I should do but never get around to actually doing so NaNoWriMo was, for me, the metaphorical kick in the pants to do some writing. And I think that the ideas I came up with whilst writing are usable - it just needs a lot of polish.

So what's next? Well, I have to step back, look at what I wrote, and figure out where I want to take the story (I figure it's maybe a quarter or so complete, but we'll see). Assuming I decide to pursue this project further, I'll have to, obviously, do a lot more writing and a lot more polishing.

And I also need to make a map.

Freak Out,
-TFitC