This is definitely a new medium I've fallen in love with. I like creating visual stories. Animating takes too long and storyboarding is too limiting.
Comics is a great artistic medium for the individual. I've learned that film/animation is mostly a collaborative medium. I feel like comics is a good medium for one to indulge in on their own. Sure, it could be a collaborative medium, but I'm saying it allows more of an opportunity for someone to thrive on their own, artistically and maybe professionally. I haven't commercialized anything. I'm just trying to articulate why I think it's so satisfying.
If you want to look at what I've posted, you can go to my website:
http://sanbles.com/comics-1/
This next part will just be the progress work. I like exploring the medium, so in a lot of these I'll talk about the motivation behind creating them.
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When Does The Happiness Kick In?
I just dug around for the draft and I think I like this version more. I think the reason I went with the imaginary girlfriend scenario is because this version resolved the conflict too easily and it felt too... angsty? If that makes any sense. I think the published version is way more angsty now that I think about it hahaha
Dan's Soup
Something I started doing from this point on was doing a lot of the sketch and draft work on my sketchbooks. With this system, I'd only use Photoshop to make the final version. And I don't usually record what I do in my sketchbook. Here's a screencap of my photoshop file, because I can't show you the really crappy versions of this, because it's buried in some sketchbook somewhere, because I don't take care of my sketchbooks, because they're all filled with bad scribbles, because I'm A BAD ARTIST.
So yeah, this idea started off as a dream where I kept running away from animals that kept coming to me around my college campus. I forgot why I added the boy. Probably so the comic could have a plot. I hadn't done a story about an old person, so I wanted to do that. Oh, and I really wanted to make a picture book. The dream plus wanting to do a picture book is what motivated me to make the thing. Everything else was secondary.
Barking Dog
I wanted to make a wordless story. At some point, I had the idea of making it about a person who goes to prison just by being at the wrong place at the wrong time and then showing his life after that. And then came the next idea which was to parallel everything that had happened pre-prison to post-prison. Pre-prison would be from the victim's perspective, post-prison would be from the criminal's. I had A LOT of issues trying to make this story work, and I still didn't land it with the final version. I still don't know if anyone actually got what happened within the last few panels. But eh, it's done.
For the art behind this, I wanted to have a style where I drew the lines and shadows on paper, but I colored digitally. I wanted to create something with texture, because I didn't like how clean Dan's Soup had turned out.
Down
I'm going to start this one off by saying that for most of the stuff I post, I like having the whole project done before anything about it goes online. Down was made for Inktober. I hadn't even started planning the story when I posted the first image. I think I completed it halfway through october. And even then, I just created the panels super quickly without giving them much thought. It was in the middle of the school year, and there's never any time to do what I want to do during the school year. But luckily, I was able to come up with this. And it gave way for what's going to be my thesis film.
The reason I made this was to test out the web format. The vertical/scrolling format. I knew I wanted to test the format out with Inktober, but I couldn't come up with anything. Then, two days before October began I just thought what can I make that emphasizes the scrolling aspect? And me with my dark humor, I got this. Even with how fast I had to churn it out, my only regret, and it's a big one, is the title. I should've called it Going Down. Ba-dum Tiss.
Here are the scanned Post-Its. Yeah, they were done on Post-Its. I thought it'd be fun to tack them up on my wall as I finished each one. Halfway through, I realized I changed the Post-Its I was using, and they were different colors. I don't know when I realized this, but when I did, it was too late to change it. Good thing color correction software exists.
Hah, I wrote the most for the comic with the weakest art. I might be trying to justify myself too much.
The Well
I wanted to make something traditionally with Ink. This was during the school year when I was reading a bunch of comics from the school's library. They had some beautiful Ink drawings, so I wanted to try it out. Also, I wanted to make a horror story. I don't know why I wanted it to rhyme.
I made the draft on Photoshop and then inked it all on paper. My brother gave me notes for the draft...
I can't find any of the raw scans, so here's a cleaned up scan. I had to remove the blue lines around the borders, and a lot of pencil scratches. If you want to know more about cleaning up ink drawings, this is a good tutorial. I didn't want to try my hand at lettering, so I let the computer do that one.
I messed up with guesstimating the canvas size if you didn't realize. The draft seems too crammed and the finished version has too much negative space, so I figure there's a lesson in that for next time.
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I'm already working on some more comic stuff. There's just so much that can be done with this! It's great. I hope you had a good time reading it and didn't get annoyed by the overuse of "I" at the beginning of every sentence.
Aloha!
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