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The coloring process is humming along. Just finished page three of chapter two. Here's panel one:
And here's an alternate version of panel one that didn't come out as well, in case you like seeing things that didn't turn out very well....
Bear with me here, this is a story with a bunch of pictures...
First I started on coloring the spaceship for the second page of Chapter two:
I liked where this was going. Check out the dinosaur's tail. I liked the look of the thick pencils with the colors laid down over it. I wanted to keep the momentum going with this. I finished it up, keeping the background colors more subdued and the foreground (the girls) more vivid.
Once I was done, I realized this turned out a lot better than how page one of chapter two did. (see previous blog entry) The mistake I made before was trying to color everything with the same amount of fidelity. The subject of the picture (cheerleader) shouldn't be drowned out by whats going on in the background. (I'm still figuring out this coloring thing) I was a little ahead anyway, so I recolored the first page again. Here's the result: the top half again of page one. Compare this to the previous entry. I think this one is a lot better. Once again the goal is to give Molly the presentation she deserves:
Just finished coloring the first page of chapter two. Here's the top half of it for your viewing pleasure. Just wait till you see what she's saying. As I posted a while back, Molly here was based on Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck and my wife. Once I drew this picture of her though, she took a life of her own, and Facebook discussions ensued regarding wether or not my wife actually has freckles. I still might tweek this picture a little. I don't want to fall behind schedule trying to perfect it. I just wish I had a professional colorist to do her justice, and for that matter a professional artist and writer to fill in for me until I then fired them for not sticking to my original vision.
Here's T-Rex displaying his dominance on the football field:
This is another peek at Chapter Three. I alomst scrapped this drawing and started over. Had a hard time getting it to look right. Meanwhile, Chapter two is still on track as long as I don't fall behind at all. I'm about to finish computer inking in the last page. After this weekend the coloring begins...
Well, lookee here. As you may know, I don't do one page as a time. I'm working on the pencils of every page of Chapter Three while finishing up Chapter Two. Here's the pencils of a key moment: the cheerleaders get covered in alien goo!
Note the different reactions from each girl: Jenny and Ashley are different levels of grossed out. Molly is pissed off. Nikki faces it openly, and Amber is facinated...
We spend too much of our time trying to impress each other and acting pretentious. Reading a comic book is one of the few activities that can't be attached to this ulterior motive. It's not like reading some intellectual novel so that everyone sees what a deep thinker you are, or listening to the alternative indie punk rock band to prove how super hip you are. You're not going to impress anyone reading a Spider Man comic in public. It won't help you get a date, or a job. No, the only reason to read comics is, you actually like to.
Similarly, comic books are a humle medium. Even the most deep and complex comic book (such as Watchmen) at the end of the day is still a comic book. It will never be the great novel of our time, or the epic blockbuster movie. It's not trying to be. Sometimes, this leads to an inferiority complex. Comic book nerds will call them selves things like "comic book nerds" and hope their favorite book becomes vindicated by being made into a hollywood movie. Comics don't need Hollywood to validate them. It is fun to see them on the big screen, but remember that some of that humble, lack of pretense will be lost. There's a lot of overlap with comics and movies since they're both fun and visual, but not everything translates well (compare Watchmen the movie to the comic).
I look forward to one day selling out on these beliefs when DRC the movie is made.
For those of you who felt chapter one needed more cheerleader action, behold Chapter Two Page Two:
I think this ones ready for coloring. So far pages one and two of the next chapter are ready for coloring. Four more to go. If I do one each week, then dedicate a week per page for coloring, it will be ready just in time for my Halloween deadline. Meanwhile, I'm also working the pencils for Chapter Three. Thats just how I roll.
This is something I've been meaning to do for a while: I'm shifting the inking to the computer instead of on the paper for Chapter Two. This won't really save me any time. It turns out this is just as, or more time consuming as the old fashioned way, but it will improve the overall quality of my drawings.
Inking is not just tracing over the pencils. ("I'm not a tracer!") Its a process that adds depth and dintinction to the drawing. Its also a good way to quickly ruin a drawing. Inking every line that you see with the same line quality will make it look horribly flat. The best approach I've found is to think of it as redrawing the same picture on top of the old drawing. It takes a lot of skill to ink in a drawing and improve it. Its a skill I don't have. I've made many of my pencil drawings look worse after being inked in. Here's an example: for the bottom panel of page 6, where the robot grabs the T Rex by the tail, I had to make it look right. When I was inking it in, I screwed up the robot by pooping out lines that were too thick all over him. This is what it looked like after I ruined it:
I didn't want that panel in particular to look so weak, so I redrew and reinked the whole thing. That new version was acceptable:
And more recently, I started inking in on paper the picture of Molly for Chapter Two. I completely goobered it up. Here's the original pencils:
And here's the goobered up inked version:
Ugh.
Horrible. I couldn't settle for something that crappy looking for that pic. Molly deserves better.
So I decided to take the pencils and do what I normally do on paper with the computer instead. I took two layers of the same picture and put them on top of each other. The bottom one, I made extra dark, the top one was medium. Then I used the program (GIMP) to partially erase through the top drawing on lines I wanted thick and dark to make the bottom dark drawing show up more. Then I used a white "paint brush" to remove the lines I didn't want anymore and to improve the line quality of the ones that were still there. There is probablly a more efficient way to do it, but I'm still learning. There is still something lost in not inking directly on the page, but this lets me undo mistakes and achieves a drawing thats closer to the original pencils. Heres what Molly looks like now. Gaze upon her now in all her hotness:
I was excited about whats coming up in Chapter Two. I wanted to show it off without giving anything away. So, here's the teaser with a few key cropped images I plucked out from several pencilled pages of the next chapter:
DH
