Graphic Novel Development Journal, #4

After finishing the drawing and inking, it was time to scan and put it all together. Unfortunately I discovered upon scanning that the paper I had been drawing on was ever so slightly cut wrong; as a result, my pages are all warped. This isn’t noticeable in person, but on the computer it’s very noticeable that the panels are not entirely straight. This was infuriating after all the work I’d put in, but forging ahead nonetheless.

I decided that I wanted to colour the comic, but I wanted to tint it akin to what filmmakers did with silent films. In silent films such as Nosferatu (1922) and Intolerance (1916), tinting was employed to convey time of day (yellows and greens for daytime, blues and purples for nighttime), temperature (red for hot, blues for cold), or the emotions of the scene. I felt that, due to the slower pace of this graphic novel and the influence I am taking from silent and international film, this would be an appropriate choice. However, I didn’t have the time I wanted to colour it to my satisfaction; at the moment there are just one shade of each colour per page, but given some time I would like to go back and create different hues and shades of each colour to add more dimension for the artwork.

This also lead me into just how detailed my work is. Upon examination at a smaller scale, I noted that my art was incomprehensible because of the linework. I basically need to re-draw these pages for final publication. It’s just too condensed. I will be redrawing and spreading the events out even further – from 10 to 20 pages or so. I don’t want to lose the detail, and I think this will be a good choice in the long run. Because I want to keep moving, I will do this at a later date and continue working on the next pages in a slightly less detailed, more decompressed style.

I also had major issues with lettering – my hand writing simply isn’t neat enough, and even using websites like calligraphr didn’t make the lettering any more intelligible. I decided to use a free font from Blambot in the end. I ran into another roadblock as well. Because I had already hand lettered everything, I was severely limited in my placement of the baloons, and in many pages the balloons look like they’re sitting atop the artwork rather than properly integrated with it. Going forward, I will not be lettering any pages by hand, even for practice, and will purely save that step for the digital process.