Some Thoughts on Comics

Here are some sketches and workups for a story I have been building slowly over the past few months. It started with this drawing of a firefox from last June

and draws on Asian (mostly) mythology, Watership Down by Richard Adams, Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke, computer games like Starcraft and DungeonSeige, the Alien trilogy, Chinese landscape paintings and the art of Katsushika Hokusai, battle-epics, and the poem My True Love Has My Heart by the Elizabethan poet Philip Sydney.


St. Trueseam


St. Trueseam


Human form sporting same ornamentation and tattoos


sketches: swallows, rabbit saint, little fox, insect queen with a diadem of stolen pearls, black swan princes, some crappy cats and a little rabbit


fox saint with gems and medals


aeromouse captain


acheivement chart

The main challenge apart from working on the storyline, which will coalesce in time, is omcing up with a drawing style that I can maintain consistently for a long time. I love the line quality of the foxes above, but have concerns about weight once combined with value (ie. in a crowded scene areas of value would be valuable in order to distinguish levels of the plicture plane, etc. - but will such fine lines hold up against areas of darkness, and might too many fine lines become tangled anyway? (But, see this Hokusai print for potential refutation...)
[I know, what a terrible picture - why even bother including it?]
Anyway - did some sketching of frames, which I kind of hated until I worked it up in Photoshop a little:


blank bug hive

Bug hive colored
Now it looks ok, but upon re-examining the work of Hokusai and Chinese landscape painters, am reminded that one of my initial inspirations is the supreme clarity of line evinced by Hokusai, usually with no shading at all - must play to strengths and follow drinking gourd! No doubt recent aquisition of new drawings tools will help. :)

Image Bank

Kitsune


Alien Queen


Watership Down


Okkotonushi from Mononoke Hime


Starcraft


Dungeon Siege inventory panel


Clear Spring by Hong Ren


Hokusai