FLIGHT

This is a comic/graphic novel I'm working on. It's not colored yet, but I'm going to start posting bits of it here as I go, just for the sake of trying to motivate myself. The book's working title is Hotel Metropolitan. I'm sure everyone here respects intellectual proppity, and all, but it still doesen't hurt to ask that no-one rip this off. Assuming it's worth ripping off.

Page 2. Not lettered yet, as the scan wasn't quite what I wanted, but instead of tinker I thought I'd post it up anyhow as it'll likely be a week before I get to it again.

beautiful detail. I look forward to seeing more

_________________

Thanks man. Professionals are a tough crowd! These also take me an awfully long time to do, given my work schecule to make ends meet. The next page is likely to be a very long time indeed - a cityscape is involved, God help me.

Nice drawing man. You might want to thicken up the lines on your foreground elements to seperate them from the backgrounds. Maybe throw in a few carefully chosen spots of black. Your pencilling seems pretty solid though.

Steve

_________________

That's good stuff. You've got some real suggestions of depth in the first few panels -- it would be nice to see the linework (and eventual coloring/scaling?) bring it out more.

The transition from the next-to-last panel to the last is sweet.

_________________
_g
www.unnecessaryg.com
http://megatexas.livejournal.com

Yeah, I was too timid with the pens I selected for the second page. I'm getting much better results by mixing in brushwork on the next page, as well as some heavier pens. I'm toying with going back to this one and "remastering" it with some brush, but in the end I think I just have to live with it and keep going forward. Maybe when I'm done with this chapter I'll go back and redraw the page but for now I think forward momentum is the better part of valor.

--M

After much delay and innumerable excuses (not the least of which was a lot of travel that kept me from my studio) I finally finished inking the next page.

I'm ramping up my use of brush, steel pen and technical pen, together. I've never used brushes this way before so it's kind of a new deal for me. Bolder than the last page anyway. It's all a learning experience.

Cool. Wow that's a lot of detail and perspective. How long did it take you to pencil that panel?

_________________

Ah, the azimuthal perspective. Truth be told, I faked it mostly. But you can tell. I couldn't say how long it all took me , to be honest, but I'd say probably 20 hours or so. And most of the time I could only work on it for about 15 minutes a day, at best.

I see. Do you have Dave Chelsea's Perspective for Comic Book Artists by any chance? I think I'll bust that out pretty soon once I get going on the book I'm working on with my friend.

_________________

Chelsea's book is an excellent one but I also recommend Architectural Graphics by Francis D.K. Ching as a general primer for drawing environments in perspective.

In this case, though, I faked it mainly because in true perspective the buildings were so either so distorted when I constructed them, or the viewing angle was so narrow, that you failed to get a really deep image of the city in the background. The horizon line is curved (concealed behind the last line of buildings) and the vertical zenith-nadir line has its vanishing point below the bottom of the page. Besides, what I wanted was more of an impression of dense urban substrate than the true details of each and every building. The most important buildings, mainly in the foreground, I did build from rough groundplans projected to the nadir and vanishing points, but this only looked convincing up to a point - beyond that, I just relied on my own sense of what "felt right." In the end, that led to a lot of erasing and white paint, but I am generally satsifed with the result.

In the page I'm pencilling now (two pages after this one - the next one is inking) the view is from street level and so true constructed perspective is a little more important. But in the end, I'm always likely to sacrifice technical reality to visual effect. It's the opposite of what I have to do as an architect, though, which is amusing to me. And of course, this is all pretty new to me, so I'm still doing a lot of experimenting with style and technique.

--M

Awesome details!

I'd be interested to see your balloon placement for the previous page, cause depending on the treatment it will really affect the flow of how the page is read. Right now I feel like the car breaking the bottom panel leads right into the last on on the right side, so you read it first before the three on top of it.

_________________
http://www.exxcalibur186.deviantart.com
http://joshmauser.blogspot.com

Next page. Still, even STILL... no lettered. I'm still selecting fonts.

The next page. Also, note above that I've begun lettering the pages. Haphazardly. But it's all from a script so it doesn't really matter, the order, I guess.