Watercolour Crowning Progression

[VulpesHilarianus]

Alright, so this thread is about a little comic I started a few months ago called Watercolour Crowning. The name comes from my love of watercolour painting and that it's vaguely about the characters becoming their utmost best, or to be a "Crowning Achievement" of sorts. It involves every single one of the characters from the books I'm working on, plus two new ones. So far I've only done the sketches for the first two pages and grey-scaled the first page. I'll be posting the pages accordingly as they come along. Any feedback as to design, style, and layout will be taken into consideration and more than likely replied to. I'm hoping I get this done, seeing as how I've dropped all of my other projects prematurely.

[Aigis]

One thing to work on if you don't want to have panel borders is the placement of the speech bubbles. When you have no panel borders it becomes really important that each panel guides your eye towards the correct place to start reading the next panel. Since you're using such basic art and there are so many speech bubbles in this page you just posted, they should be the primary means of doing that.

The place in the comic page where this becomes a problem is between the first and the second panel. You have two speech bubbles directly on top of each other ("Why?" and "Is it my art?") with little space between. That means that the eye is going to be guided from the top one to the bottom one. This is a problem because you're reading the speech bubbles in that panel out of order (you should be reading "Why do I keep hurting myself?" first).

In the West we're conditioned to read comics left to right both in pages, and in each panel. But you have to make sure you help people along in that respect.

There's way more to learn about guiding people's eyes through comic pages, though. I'd recommend checking out the book Making Comics by Scott McCloud.

[Pirakaboss]

Well, the art is fine so far even if this is a concept sketch. I'd just like to point out that in the first part, the man seems a bit cramped up as if his shoulders are being pushed up against him. The perspective is great. One thing that might need fixing is the layout of the chat bubbles. It's abit hard to follow it's flow and know who's the speaker. You might want to connect chat bubbles or use boxes if a person is thinking to himself and there is lengthy text. Don't be afraid to overlap some of it with the line art. I wish you luck!

[VulpesHilarianus]

Thanks for the info. About the cramped shoulders: I'm actually supposed to be taking a breath right before I sigh. Didn't feel like writing in *sigh* though so there's that. As for the chat bubbles and borders: The chat bubbles were just there to get a feel for where I wanted the dialogue. The borders aren't there because in sketch form they clutter up the image too much. Right now I'm doing first gen work. Prototyping the layout and format so to say. When I feel comfortable enough, I'll redo almost all of this with the panels being more dynamically placed. Second page is more or less the same thing, minus the clutter:

[VulpesHilarianus]

Alright, so for some reason SAI won't work. I've been cleaning my files and rearranging them, so I may have displaced some needed files from the SAI folder. I'm going to grab my old PC and re-install the program, so hopefully I don't have to move to another program like ArtRage that I'm unfamiliar with. I'd like to get this comic up and runnning, but that's going to be hard if I have to acquaint myself with a new medium and process.

[VulpesHilarianus]

Alright, so now SAI is working again and I'm doing some stuff to see how I can do paneling and word bubbles without using any special tools. As of now I'm just messing with a mini-comic to get used to this new technique. Probably going to post it here soon.

[Template88]

At 1/16/13 03:04 AM, VulpesHilarianus wrote: Alright, so now SAI is working again and I'm doing some stuff to see how I can do paneling and word bubbles without using any special tools. As of now I'm just messing with a mini-comic to get used to this new technique. Probably going to post it here soon.

as interesting as your mini blog updates are i would really like to see more art instead

[VulpesHilarianus]

I was hoping to keep this veiled till I finished it, but since the thing about it is the word bubbles and paneling anyways, I guess I'll show it.

[maficmelody]

Why are there circles on the arms?

At 1/20/13 10:50 PM, VulpesHilarianus wrote: I was hoping to keep this veiled till I finished it, but since the thing about it is the word bubbles and paneling anyways, I guess I'll show it.

[VulpesHilarianus]

At 1/21/13 12:16 AM, maficmelody wrote: Why are there circles on the arms?

At 1/20/13 10:50 PM, VulpesHilarianus wrote: I was hoping to keep this veiled till I finished it, but since the thing about it is the word bubbles and paneling anyways, I guess I'll show it.

I kept the joints but erased the wire skeleton. I notice now I like the "talk to the hand" pose a bit too much.

[VulpesHilarianus]

While having roadblocks with an animation I decided to focus more time on WCC. The end result is that a wrote down about half of the main storyline already and finished a few character designs. As of now I have the finalised current and future designs of Marcy, Renee, Tyde, and the cats. I've also finished the uncoloured current design for David, another new character being added into the mix. Decided to show the back iew as the "nude" view so that people can see his build without feeling awkward.

[VulpesHilarianus]

Things are coming along slowly but surely. Had a lot of stuff to do recently, and had to drop of on the Oinsreach show (so sorry about that John!). Anyways, WCC is coming along, even if it's at the pace of plate tectonics. Recently did the redesigned sketch of Marcy's daughter, Kyra Wendell. Should be finished sometime either this week or next. Related Linework Sketch:

[VulpesHilarianus]

(Image didn't upload. I feel like an idiot.)