telophase | Spindrift blathering

I'm currently working on Spindrift, the Next Thing that

rachelmanija and I are working on. I'm thunmbnailing it out right now - for those of you who don't know what that is, it's when you work out each page of the comic in a small version so you can see the whole thing at once. You keep it small to force yourself not to worry about the details, but about the overall composition and balance of darks and lights.

I finished thumbnailing the whole thing the other day. I'd started out sketchy, to get a rough idea of the placement of people and objects, but once I got into the fight scene, I got fairly detailed because I wanted to get the poses down solid. And I kept doing that for the rest of the thumbs. I'm now going back and redoing the earlier thumbs to be more tight, because I think that it'll make for significantly better pencils that shouldn't take as long as they usually do.

This is the sort of thing I started out doing.

This is the sort of thing I'm doing now. (Obviously, the second page is only half done, equally obviously, it's not the same two pages as the ones above. I'll try to remember to grab a copy of the pages above when I finish them, so you can compare more easly.)

Here's an example from the fight scene, when I first started getting tighter with my thumbs. Sorry to disappoint, but they are not actually butt-nekkid during the fight.* I draw them naked at first because I need to know what their bodies are doing underneath their clothes at first.

telophase!" I hear you say. "

telophase! You say thumbnails are supposed to be small, but these pictures are huge! What gives?!"

I'm not lying when I say they're small. They are only about 2" tall ... at 300 pixels per inch. I have to convert them to 72 pixels per inch for Web display, which means they display larger. The change in resolution is why they tend to be pixelated or fuzzy - I'm working at very teeny sizes. (They'd be big black blobs if I were working at 72 ppi.)

And now to bed. Luckily it's spring break, so I can get a parking place when I meander in late.

* That comes later.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

1. That view of Manoj clinging to the cliff is awesome.

2. Do you need photo-reference of the Kerala backwaters, or are you content to type "Kerala backwater" into google images yourself?

3. Re: grape girl: Is she feeding him grapes from a bunch? (I can't even remember what I wrote.) I don't think they had grapes in Kerala at that time. Mangoes, bananas, or anonymous berries would be better.

1) THank you! I had a really hard time with the perspective on that _ I ahd two photos of climbers taken from above that didn't quite match to use for reference. I think I more-or-less got it, although I need to turn his head to slightly more profile, I think, to get across the fact that he's looking dooooown. :) The plan is to have wide, scared eyes in the final, too. :)

2) The sketchy panel 2 on that second page is actually taken from something I found by a "Kerala boat" search, although the boat is distressingly modern. I'm not too happy with it - if you can find something with a more funky-looking boat where the thrust of the action - mostly the shape of the boat and the direction it's travelling - is more vertical on the page than horizontal, and where the camera is up a bit so it's looking down into the boat a bit, that'd be wonderful.

3) I thought I remembered you saying grapes, but when I look back at the script, she's fanning him. What shape are the fans in that area? Round?

I can't stop looking at the cliff picture. That's SO COOL. It's like, your non-naked money shot right now.

thank you for sharing this. i love watching other people's process, it's fascinating and educational.

they are not actually butt-nekkid during the fight

damn! but hey, i think that cliff panel will be totally awesome, so i'll forgive any lack of nekkidness. :)

I find tight thumbs really help with the pencils later on. Looks great! The action scenes are very lively.

1) It is kick-ass.

2) I'll see what I can find.

3) Fans... uhhhh... I'll see if I can figure that out, but if not, maybe she should be feeding him a mango.

http://www.indiatouristdesk.com/assets/backwater.jpg

http://www.tourismofkerala.com/kerala_images/alappuzha-backwater4.jpg

http://www.infoindiatours.com/gifs/kasargod-backwater.jpg

http://www.target-tours.com/gifs/backwater-in-kerala.jpg

http://www.cosytours.com/images/cochinBackwater1.gif

http://www.pappiontours.com/images/backwater.jpg

http://www.indian-holidays.net/gifs/kerala-backwater1.jpg (for pole handling)

Coolness. I'm in on the cliff love.

I kept trying to read it right to left. I almost always do that with comics when I don't have the physical cues of a book to keep me on track.

Fortunately, it's not yet in a state where that significantly impedes my understanding of it. =D

The grand secret, in a most excellently done comic from whatever country, is that the art should subtly push you along. If you pop open a manga, chances are you'll see that people tend to face to the left more than they face to the right, and that a lot of the lines of action move across the page from right to left. Even though I'd noticed that before, it didn't occur to me to do that when I did the first thumbs, until half way through, and I had Manoj climbing the mountain the wrong direction, so I had to force the action from left to right in unnatural ways. I'm taking the opportunity now as I go back over the previous thumbs to change that, so he's climbing from left to right, so when he almost falls off the cliff in the big panel, the little stones he dislodges are falling left to right, so he tends to be facing to the right more often, and so on. :)

Unusual angles are major drama. "Hah! Two-point perspective is for the weak!"

:D Thanks!

Thank you! Here's hoping they're fairly clear when I get them all done...

Thankyou! XD

I'd like to claim that I'm discriminating enough to only read excellently done comics, but it would be a filthy, filthy lie. I'm used to reading comics with such screwed up art or layouts that I have to use the scientific method to determine the chronology of the panels, systematically pursuing and discarding hypotheses based on the accumulation of evidence. But my real excuse here is that I wasn't paying enough attention to let myself become enagaged by the art. That cliff shot is going to kick ass, by the way; it's riveting just as a thumbnail.

On a total tangent, I'm now wondering whether westerners who read a lot of unflipped manga frequently end up with confused sacatic patterns.

When I'm reading online amateur manga I tend to get confused over which way I should be reading. Sometimes even when there's text involved, which is a sad reflection on their writing skills. XD And occasionally I get confused by scanlations, but not often. I'm more confused there when they number pages 1-9 without leading zeros, so they're sorted out of order in the program I use to read them.

Thanks! I hope I can manage to ink the cliff so it actually looks like one. XD

I love the long-haired dude slidey panel. And I have no idea why, I just DO. :D

XDD

And I am so, so glad you knew what I was talking about. I babble when I am sleepy, even online.

Also, as everyone else said, the cliff thing? Was VERY cool.

I think the majority of my online discourse can be characterized as "babble." XD

Thanks!

Spindrift blathering

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