Terran Omega

Terran Omega came out of the idea of a last human, travelling the galaxy having adventures. A tale of Kung Fu in space.

This particular Terran Omega story was partly inspired by an idea of my pal Jim Lavery’s and Scott Ferguson helped out on dialogue/scripting. I’ve done a little bit of writing with Scott. It’s fun to work with someone else, given how much of a control freak I am.

Hope you like it, it appeared in the KickStarter for Broken Frontier’s sci fi anthology  but here it is for you, readers of the patreon!

(Later this week, I’ll talk about the writing process on this, cus I think it’s interesting…)

(I have ideas for other stories, but really, finding time is the biggest problem)

STORYTELLING!

Hey, so my Pal Steve Denton drew up a page of Dredd and I thought I could help him beef up the story telling. I thought this would be of interest. (Steve’s ok about me posting this btw, but he’s on face book if you’d like to say hello)

Here’s Steve’s original page:

So, on these redraws I have a couple of rules for myself: largely I don’t redraw any of the art. I try and use as much of the art as it exists – it’s not about quality of the linework it’s about how to strengthen the storytelling. I can accomplish that by selecting and resizing, and flipping and moving artwork around. Sometimes that leaves holes in the page and so I’ll scribble a bit of a redraw over that. But I’m always wary of the idea that many redraws are someone going “You should draw more like me”.

So, that said, here’s the redraw

Ok, I don’t have a script for this, so I might make incorrect assumptions about what’s going on a who characters are, but here’s the notes I gave to Steve (with some extra annotations as they occur to me in square brackets)

 Steve, I hope you don’t mind, I took the liberty of tweaking your page a little bit, I think there’s a few places you could pump up the story telling and help push the depth a little better.

panel one – making Dredd larger than the other judge (is the other one rico? I’ve assumed he is and dea-ged him so he looks similar but younger.)[making dredd larger is basically bringing him closer to us the reader, this adds to the sense of depth going on, especially with a bit of overlap, and making sure they’re still hanging off the same horizontal line – the eyeline on this panel is roughly where dredd/rico’s chins are. So if I increased dredd to a rediculous size, as long as I lined the chins up it would still be a convincing perspective…]

Panel two, pushed the guy over a little in the panel, so you still get the distance, but the overlap pushes the 3d that little bit more. [Also, as a friend of all letterers, I try and push all characters to the right of frame where possible…]

Panel 3, I’ve moved him further over in the panel so he’s less centre of frame (in TV this is referred to as a “Noddy” shot, when you have two people face each other you want to leave plenty of deadspace in the opposite sides – since you lack – at least in this page – a decent shot of judges and bad guy in one panel, you’d need to reinforce the fact they’re in the same room. I also blew out the left hand side of the panel. That’s really just my taste though 🙂

Fourth panel,[in tv land, this would be the reverse noddy, so you want dead space on the right here] I’ve flipped Rico(?) because you have them pointing guns in two different directions at the same guy (at least based on this one page, maybe a second page will show other bad guys, in which case my bad, but as is it looks a little confused, tweaking the direction of the gun here helps focus on the fact they’re in the same room)

and, finally, Panel 5, moved the guys over to the left again (same reason as the third panel) and moved the gun shots, since Dredd is aiming/shooting at shoulder height, makes no sense for the bullets to impact at waist height.

—–

Now, I’d add, ignoring my own rules for a second, I’d be looking at ways to vary the angles a little bit – especially that last panel which feels like it needs a worm’s eye view (a shot from below looking up), or dutch angle (a tilted angle) to add a bit more impact, it’s a little TV budget shooting right now. Something a bit more like this (for example)

 

Silhouettes

Talking about comics one day, I remarked to John McCrea “I love your use of silhouette”. John, a comics-professional’s comics-professional said “Oh yeah, I try and do one every page. It’s a real time saver”

This, for me, is up there Kirby’s famous “Every time I rub something out it costs me money”.

As practical advice it’s golden. Yes, a silhouette saves time, but, equally, and I may be wrong I think it can be striking. 

I’ve sort of gotten out of the way of trying to do a silhouette every page (I mean, I’m pretty sure John meant it in the same way Kirby meant his advice – something that feels true more than is true) but I really need to get back in to it.

There’s certainly a thing in the back of your head saying “This is cheating” but, all comics drawing is cheating. I don’t draw what people look like, I don’t draw how guns actually fire, I don’t draw what a speeding vehicle would look like. It’s cheating all the way down.

I found the above two panel sequence while searching for something else, and it lept out at me – the stark shadow following the brightly coloured panel was an intense example of contrast (even if it does look like a tilted version of the Candle Stick/Face optical illusion).

Artwork on that is by Me, with story/dialogue by Michael Carroll.

S/FX

I love S/FX I think they’re vastly underused, and – certainly as an artist – I think, when possible they should be drawn on the artboard.

I draw my s/fx in Clip Studio Paint, and it’s a technique that’s really simple but produces really effective results.

Step 1:

Create a new layer (Layers->New Raster Layer), call it SFX  (you rename a layer by double clicking the name of the layer in the layers window, this turns the name into a white box that you can then type over)- this will sit on top of all other art layers (and even on top of the frame layer if you’re using one) 

Next, in the Layer Properties (make sure Window->Layer Property is ticked) turn on the Border Effect (it’s the little black circle with white outline). This sets a border around anything drawn on this layer. 

Set the Edge Colour to black (just click the edge colour, which defaults to white and select black) and increase the thickness, your mileage will vary here according to your tastes, but I like a decently thick outline.

Now, set the pen colour to white and select your favourite drawing pen…

And write your SFX on the SFX layer, and you should get something like this…

or this

or this

or … well, you get the idea…

It’s for the birds

Was listening to a radio show that touched on the fact that the short story the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘The Birds’ was based on (also called ‘The Birds’) was really rather good, as well as being set in Cornwall (where my wife is from, and we’re we’d recently been to) it was also an allegory of the Blitz.

So I sat down and read it, and it IS good.

And I then started watching the movie. Which is also good (if you can ignore some of the ropier effects) the imagery is amazing, and the while the blitz allegory is entirely gone, it’s pretty good.

(Though, frankly, Melony seems a wrong ‘un – driving 60 miles to play a prank on a bloke she just met after getting her father’s employee to dig up his home address? I mean, it could take a turn for the psycho…)

Anyway, another frustrating time with digital paint, but there it is.

dredd wip

Slightly frustrating weekend. Had intended to get two pages done, got one done. So tomorrow I’ve a dredd to finish (and it’s a week late) I’ll catch up the next week (fingers crossed) been struggling with pencils (in every sense of the word; struggling to figure out how to draw and actually struggling to see what I’m drawing – another visit to the opticians due probably) But on the flip side, been finding digital inks pretty enjoyable.

I bounce back and forth between loving/hating digital inks – in the plus column, it’s the only medium that feels like the medium is invisible – I’m drawing as though I were writing – it’s purely effortless. In the minus it doesn’t have the same visceral satisfaction as inking traditionally does.

Anyone, one page done this weekend. Rubbish. (Though technically, I did do seven pages of storyboards as well…)

Trapper Hag

Doing a thing for a thing, can’t talk about it, but doing it. Have asked someone to ink it. Can’t talk about it. 

Hopefully this thing gets used in the thing and the person I can’t talk about gets to ink it, and then I can be all aglow.

Anyway, shh! You ain’t seen this…

Storyboards

Spent today doing a last minute storyboarding job for a chum.

There are things I’m good at and things I’m bad at. Things I’m good at I like to talk about, and I like to make big pointed reference to how average I am at them, and things I’m bad at I like to shout about and make light of it – because it pains me.

One thing I think I’m actually pretty good at is storyboards.

Laying out a story, communicating required elements, and not getting bogged down in over rendering – all play to my strengths.

There’s a few things I’ve noticed myself doing that are a real hang up of comics:

1) Left to right travel is even MORE important in storyboards. Flipped the horizontal on at least three or four boarded images just to keep the left-right flow going. It’s because the story boards aren’t descrete images the way comic panels are- rather they’re a single scene playing out, and cutting to a movement right to left feels odd.

2) Scene setting even more important than comics – I like to drop backgrounds in comics (often removing panel borders and giving white), or cheat them at least, and while many many backgrounds in tv are cheated (just watch line of duty and notice how much of the BG is out of focus) you can’t just drop them altogether., you’ve gotta keep backgrounds.

3) establishing where characters are in relation to each other. Again, in comics, there’s more scope to just cut characters out of a drawing, when the focus is the other character – the page serves as a constant reminder of where everyone is, doing the same thing in a story board has the effect of making the character look like they disappeared.

4) Can’t change panel shapes. Even if you change the panel shapes. I’ll stretch and expand the frame I’m using to draw a story board IF it’s supposed to include some sort of camera movement, so in the above example, that frame is taller than the view that the viewer will see. But even if you do that, you’ve still gotta keep in mind they’re looking at a landscape view – big tall things don’t work (and I like tall panels)

Anyway, those are all the tiny nuggets I gleaned from the little amount of story boarding I’ve done.

The above image btw is from the World of Tanks video game sequence, I story boarded and drew up final art that’s been animated for the game. It’s  pretty crazy!

And, as if to prove, that no plan survives contact with the enemy, I ultimately dropped Tower Bridge above for Big Ben, and inked it up and it was coloured by Dee Cuniffe 

Darkseid Digital Doodle

mmm… Always frustrated that things are less realistic than I want. I don’t think I knew what I wanted from this digital paint job, but this isn’t quite it.(I like the Kirby crackle though…)