Week 16a

Today in class we finished our critique and I gave feedback to my fellow students. Whenever my half of the critique was done we went downstairs and helped Jeri's class with their HTML.

Here is a picture of the feedback I received last class, the typed version is on my blog post last week:

Week 15b

My prompt: "The night before the wedding, a hypochondriac hostage negotiator wakes up in a strange house."











Feedback from the critique:
- Color is visually consistent
- Nice use of textures
- Creates emphasis on emotions
- Nice panel shapes
- nice perspective/ point of view
- Background in one panel needs a little more work
- Doesn't have consistent border breaks
- Font choice could be different
- Action lines in last page first panel could help show that his head is moving
- Get rid of "thinking" part at bottom of page three
- Action lines in place of text for certain elements
- The "Rub" part goes on for too long
- Fire looks a bit like pig ears
- Visually separate the ooze from the clever 
- Penciled in texture look good, use them more

Week 15a

Today in class I put the finishing touches on my Comic. The first thing I did was to complete the little bit of text that was missing from the page. I need to add the rubbing sound effect to a couple of panels. In my script I had a "fwoosh" sound effect in the last panel when the ropes catch fire, but I decided to cut that because I just couldn't work it into the panel I had drawn. Plus the fire didn't look like a fwoosh kind of fire.



Then I went through and proof read all of my text on the page. I didn't really find mistakes, but I found places where I could cut words out, or reword things to bring down my word count. I wanted to do this because a lot of my word balloons were looking pretty full and needed trimmed down.



I was struggling for awhile with what to do with the panels where I had characters interrupting each other. I tried to have the balloons overlap each other in a bunch of different ways, but none of that worked. After talking to Professor Pannifino I ended up not having the balloons overlap and it still looked like the characters were interrupting each other.



Finally I lowered the opacity on the comic pages by ten percent. This was another change I made after talking to Professor Pannifino. He felt that the colors might be overwhelming when printed out, and after seeing the colors dulled down a bit I agree that it should look better this way.

Week 14 Out of Class

   This week out of class I finished drawing my comic pages between Monday and Wednesday and then over the weekend I finished coloring them in and got most of the word balloons completed.For my type faces I picked two, one for the word balloons and one for all of the sound effects. I think both go well with my drawing style and the thick lines of the comic. One trouble that I had with drawing the comic was keeping it clean since I "inked" it in pencil, but adjusting the levels in Photoshop got rid of almost all of the smudges. For awhile when I was making the balloons here I had a black outline on the balloon shape and it just didn't quite look right. Eventually I tried seeing what it looked like without the line and it was much better. Since the balloons couldn't match the drawing style they looked better as flat shapes sitting on top of the comic.

Week 14b

    Today in class I worked on coloring in the first two pages of my comic. When I was setting them up in Photoshop I left the black levels down a little lower so as not to make my pencil lines look solid black. I wanted the pencil to still look like pencil. This was important to me because I think the pencil creates a very expressive line that add excitement to the comic. Where as a solid black line does not express as much feeling. Also I enjoy the rough feeling created by the pencil lines because it isn't perfect and this lets the reader connect with it more. It breaks the illusion a little bit. For my colors I have a tannish yellow, an orangish red, and a teal. I picked colors that are all nearish to primary colors so that they contrast strongly and clearly separate the elements on the page. I think after I'm done coloring all of the pages in I might go pack and bump down the opacity on the colors a tiny bit to make them a little less intense. 

week 13 out of class

Thanksgiving break, see Week 14a

Week 14a

     Over break I made my first finished page for the comic. I decided to use pencil to "ink" the comic because I liked the more organic look of it. Also the pencil creates a nice soft texture that makes the comic look a little friendlier. Another good thing about pencil is it really reinforces the hand drawn element of the comic with its lack of a solid black. In class today I started and finished the second page of my comic. For all of the pages I'm doing a half inch gutter at the large scale because I think keeping the gutter constant will help with creating unity across the pages. To draw the final pages I'm sketching them in non-photo blue pencil first and then going over them with a  6B pencil. One challenge I'm having is keeping them smudge free, but if I'm careful I can keep them fairly clean.