While I’m still on the A&S Supreme forum, I thought it was high time to do another Progress Report. Last time I mentioned that I wanted to work on females and backgrounds. So how am I doing?
Judge for yourself. I posted another one in the scrapbook that also has a robot. Most of the other images I have weren’t inked, so they don’t scan all that well. You’ll see more in the test page coming up. As you can see, female body types are something I need to work on, but also making sure my females don’t look like males.
As far as backgrounds, you may have seen more backgrounds in the Jake & Leon comics, as well as the Christmas special, which also built up the world they live in. (Although I appear to have a little girl who survived a run-in with the Joker. Sorry, kid.) But at least I’m trying.
Another thing I’ve been working on lately is coloring. You’ve seen a few different ways in Jake & Leon, especially when I go into one of their perspectives. Jake, being a cartoonist, I’ve been doing with coloring pencils to give the impression that it’s imagined drawn-style, while Leon’s is more of a “doodle”, so I color those panels the same way I do the rest of the comic. However, I’ve taken to doing others artwork as well. Two artists who have allowed me to post my stuff on deviantART have liked what I’ve done, at least.
The first one is a picture of Scooter, my favorite GoBot, as drawn by “acsoundwave”. She does good art, so give it a look.
The other is an excellent piece of artwork by Jerzy Drozd, featuring Man-E-Faces and Orko from Masters of the Universe. I plan to do another one with my favorite Transformer (if you’ve read the blog long enough, you know who that is), which I’ll also post to the “Turnerized” gallery. You can click the images here to check them out in my section.
However, after doing these what I would later find to be the hard way, I found this tutorial in Paint Shop Pro coloring, by a fellow ShadowWing that I’ve spoken to (via e-mail) before. Now I know what that “mask” thing is. I also found this tutorial about lettering in PSP, which is a lot easier than trying to get the word balloons that come with the program to work. So I ended up doing two different versions of the test page for this report.
Before finding these tutorials.
After finding the tutorials.
EDIT: Just thought I should add that I know there isn’t a big difference in the final product. When it comes to the process, however, using the mask and coloring by layers made it easier to get what I wanted. If I can curve the balloon tails like the ones that come with PSP 7, that will be an improvement, but it’s easier to get the balloons to not have so much “dead space”.
And again, the scene is just some weird thing in my head, with a superhero called Super Hero. (You’ll notice the comic title in my “Scanning My Collection” logo. And yes, his costume colors were inspired by Mighty Mouse. 😀 ) So the dialog makes no bloody sense. Which brings up a new concern. Are my storytelling skills dimming from lack of use? Have I spent too long on a gag/commentary comic and not enough on a superhero/sci-fi action adventure? I don’t know. But I intend to find out.
I picked up Canson’s “Create Your Own Comic Book” kit at the local Blick’s. (Which sadly doesn’t have a lot of comic-related materials these days. The saleslady said they don’t sell very well, so either there aren’t a lot of comic creators in Connecticut, or they just order everything through the mail.) This comes with numerous samples for layouts, cover layouts, and the actual pre-measured art boards. There are some other things that come with it, like pens and trading card art boards that may or may not come in handy in the future. I haven’t really played with the set yet, but my next Progress Report will be an actual test comic.
Yes, I have a few story ideas that I don’t see me doing past the first issue, and I’ll be doing one of those. All I can say for now is that it’s inspired both by Action Age and a throwaway comment Snell made in one of his posts. See, I get inspired by the oddest things. 🙂 (No, I’m not calling Snell odd. Although he might be, I don’t know him personally. 😛 ) So keep your eyes out for my next Progress Report and see if I can write an action story better than I can draw.
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