Project Review and The Cover

Project Review

At this point in the project, I have realized that things have changed so much that the final result I was imagining in the beginning does not quite match what I am working on at the moment. In this situation, there are two options: either course correct or restructure. The second option would not be possible in the context of a client commission or a studio project (unless one is extremely persuasive, I suppose). Since this is a personal project, I do not have this problem, so I can choose to lean into the evolution of the story instead of cutting things short. I would like to slightly restructure the project aim, which had been a series of images in a portfolio style, into something more focused.

The original plan was to create very generic images using the characters from well-known stories.

Original Tasks:

1. Character Designs (Lineup of 5)
2. Black and white (3) illustrations
3. Set of five (5) vignettes
4. One (1) two page spread
5. Two (2) full page spreads
6. Book cover (Front and back)
7. Poster Style illustrations (3)
8. Five (5) pages in a graphic novel style
9. Illustrations (3) with text as part of the image
10. Presentation

The thing that ended up happening instead was that the characters took off and became part of a story all on their own whilst I was designing them. Another thing that happened was that I started working on the graphic novel before working on the planned projects (the spreads) and ended up taking longer because I worked on fourteen pages instead of two.  Clearly, I have not quite stuck to the plan here.

Looking back at what I have accomplished so far, I can’t say that the images I have created are representative of the story that has bloomed in my mind as I have been spending time with these characters. Someone reading my blog posts or looking at a collection of these sketches and drawings has no context beyond the fact that I redesigned some fairytale characters. This would be all fine and good if it were all that I did during this course, but it really isn’t representative of my work, even if I managed to refine the part that has the most storytelling, the Prologue from the previous two assignments, into a shape in the allotted time I have left.

So I thought I would start with the ending. What would a final presentation of this particular project look like now? Before, it would have simply been a series of images with titles underneath and a slider with the comic pages, now I have to work with a little more story. I think the best course of action would be to treat this a little bit like a visual development portfolio. Visual development is basically concept art, the first stages of working out a project, usually videogames and animated shows. I don’t actually know if comic artists do this too. Something to look up. I’m sure they do something similar anyway.

I will give some examples of portfolios I liked below, but the gist is that I have to make a presentation of images, which shows the basic story and design of the project. A proper visual development portfolio has some character designs, environments (interior and exterior), and objects, meant to give a fairly comprehensive idea of the visual language one would use for the project. I do not plan to do anything quite so complex, and I have to confess that figuring out how to make all of those things look unitary and “well-designed” is giving me a bit of a complex. I will simply make a summary of the story and illustrate it, then add the images I have worked on so far at the end (perhaps in a slightly more refined form.)

https://sammichanportfolio.weebly.com/ (Sammi Chan) – This artist has everything from character designs to sculpts. I like how they included reference photos of the textures that inspired the environments.

The Adventures of a Bear Cub. (Polina Shumkova) – This artist has more narrative and is probably the one I will emulate.

Francesca Risoldi – This is the most complex portfolio, showing several projects and illustrations. The Wuthering Heights project is the one I’m interested in the most. I like how the artist allows the images to be very sketchy in some places. Her style is obviously very well-honed, so everything looks cohesive and deliberate, but many of the images are left unfinished. I also love the use of shape and textures.

The Cover

Despite not having finished the comic prologue, I decided to move on with the cover anyway. I will be working on the comic between projects in order to get it to a little more legible standard. All I had in mind for this cover going in was that I wanted something fairly simple, with Verner as the only character on the page, and I wanted to make a fairly nice title design which I could use in other places as well.

I’m not much of a designer, so I first used standard fonts to get a general idea of what I wanted, then I looked up what fantasy and action adventure titles looked like and approximated.

I had to do a little bit of Frankenstein-esque font splicing to get some of these to work, and then rasterized the layers and adjusted them some more with the warp tool, but in the end I think I got something fairly serviceable. I also added feathers, because sometimes the obvious motif is the best one.

Examples of Fantasy/Action Adventure Covers (films, books, and graphic novels)

The Drawing

This process was straightforward, all considered. Thumbnails, sketches, some sketch splicing then the final ink and color. My only regret is that I have once again discarded the best sketch at the last minute because of overthinking. Not sure how to mitigate this when it always feels right in the moment.

Thumbnails

Circled the elements I liked, then reused them for a new version.

Same process.

This sketch is a little stiff, but I like the straightforwardness of it. It fits the graphic novel approach. I imagined it as the colored character on an entirely white background. That isn’t what I ended up doing.

I tried to draw the frontal pose in contrapposto to give it more dynamism, but he always ended up looking weirdly shy. The side profile was more dramatic in the moment, so I used it instead and messed up the overall design, which worked better when he was facing forward. This unfortunate development can be seen very clearly at the beginning of the video.

The vertical half-text, half-image design worked much better when the character was in a straighter pose, so I tried redoing this one with a more traditional text-on-top-image-on-bottom. I’m not sure if I like it better. What was minimalistic and clear before is just kind of sparse now. His expression is nicer though.

Trying to squeeze in this more dynamic pose into half of the page really did a disservice to the graphic potential of the original concept, which required a stiffer pose, and didn’t really achieve dynamism because the character just looks stiff. I really should stop second guessing myself like this.

I also have yet to figure out how to do a simple background that feels cohesive with the character. I might play around with some textures and some different colors later and see how it looks. A completely featureless background works great for a cleaner style, but I like a lot of texture, so this might be a little unbalanced.

Conclusion

I’m going to scrap the original plan and move forward with the sequence of illustrations from above. That’s seven illustrations of differing complexity. The presentation also requires some colored character designs (just one for each). I will also have to clean up some sketches, add a monster design or two (as sketches), and work on the comic throughout.

So:

Part 8: Four illustrations + Clean sketches

Part 9: Three illustrations + 1 color version of each character

 Part 10: Put it all together.