Potter's Wheel

A took on a few non-comics commissions a little while ago, one of which was to listen to the song 'Potters Wheel' by  John Denvor and to do one big illustration. Apart from that, I had no other direction. I could come up with any image, any style, any media; whatever they song influenced me to draw. 


Here is the piece I came up with:

This was too big to scan in one go; somewhere between a3 and a2 size, so in the process the top right looks a little blurry. 


Drawn initially with pencil, then with a pot Winsor & Newton black indian ink and a brush, a kuretake waterbrush filled with an ink solution and a set of Faber Castell 'Shades of grey' pens. 


Some work in progress:

Reference photo: 

Some pencils:

Inks before wash:

Multilingual comic creation

My comp copies of Ri Ra #2, the Irish language kid's comicbook, just arrived in the post the other day and looks great. I have a 3 page story inside and with not speaking enough Gaelige to write the script myself, I had an odd process with this one.

I started off with the basic idea for a story, following on from the same theme and characters from #1, based on a young boys first year at school. I broke the idea into panels and scribbled the layout down on paper.

Then I sent Desy Downey, a fiddle playing, Irish language teacher of mine, the layouts with a brief description of what was happening in the story/panels and the kind of thing that the character would be thinking.


For example:

PG1


Ttitle
1/ Close up on Boy, wearing hurling helmet
2/ Grumpy PE teacher is telling the boys about team spirit. The boy is the smallest in the line and is not looking forward to the match because in his old school he was really bad at sports.
3/ The teacher goes into a rant about how winning is more important than playing. 
4/ The boy is picked last (as usual)


Then Desy came back with a poem that would be laid over/incorporated into the art, with a rough translation of what he was writing. The verse obviously reads a lot better in Irish than it does in English, but the English text doesn't appear in the comic at all.


PAGE 1


1 NARR (Ar ais ar scoil agus anois corpoiliúint, (back to school and now PE)
 agus tá a fhios ag cách go mbeidh muid ag fulaingt! (and everyone knows we’ll all be suffering)
2 Múinteoir ;  anois a dhálta, an rud is fearr ná comh-oibriú (Now students, the best thing is team work)
Buachaill ; Tá sé cosúil le seanscoil s’agamsa, b’éigean dom éalú !(IT’s like my old school, I have to escape!)
3 Múinteoir ; agus rud is measa ná ag cáiliú an clúiche (and the worst thing is losing the game)
Buachaill, is fuath liom spóirt níor mhaith liom é chóiche! (I hate sport, I’ve never liked it)
4 Múinteoir: Tá mé dul a roghnú na foirne anois, seas suas go modhúil (I’m gonna pick the teams now stand up orderly)
Buachaill:  Mise an duine is lú, beidh mé ag fánacht go dtí an deireadh! (I’m the smallest person, I’ll be waiting untill the end)


After sending the text and layouts of for approval to Aidan Courtney for approval, I drew the finished art; Linework on paper, colours in photoshop then letters with Adobe Illustrator.

For example. page 1:

You can see I'm drawing in a more cartoony style for this comic as its aimed for ages 8-14 year olds. If you want to get a copy you can order both issues online here and its available in a lot of Irish comic stores as well.
If you know of any Gaelige speaking schools as well, you should let them know this is available as it works as a really great teaching aid.

The end is nigh...

Here's part 2 of my 'script to finished page' process I was using for the Demented story in 2012: A final prayer. Part 1, including the script, is here.

6/ Calendar: The calendar in Bob's script pops up various times in the eight page story so I wanted to create it in photoshop (simply using the text, select and fill tools) and impose it on the images so I wouldn't draw it too muddled trying to squeeze in all the numbers.

I had forgotten to mention before, but although Bob's script mentioned the calendar appearing on panel 3, there was an angle I wanted to use later in the story that meant it was better to have it over Aida's head and so established on panel 2. An examples like this is why I find it's often helpful to layout an entire story, or at least scenes or issues at a time, rather than just before drawing each page.

7/ Redraw: Looking at the scanned page, panel 5 was much too cluttered and needed a little more room for both dialogue and to make out what was happening:
I took the scanned panel and on a new photoshop file moved things about and digitally sketched around it.

The characters looked a little squashed, and the panel wasn't going to fit into the original space anyway so I stretched it a little and turned in a blue colour.
The I printed out the blue panel and inked over it with my pens/brush. When I rescanned it I could quickly and easily take away the blue channel on photoshop so I'm left with just the black line.


8/ Black and white artwork: Finished the inks on the rest of the page and digitally put panel 5 into place, then used the curve tool to get a really strong contrast between the black and white.
To get the wallpaper texture I simply took a photo of my studio wallpaper, again using curves to bring out the pattern. I used the transform and perspective tool to fit the pattern to the walls as seamlessly as possible, and used my PS 'blood brush', which I'd created previously by scanning in an ink splat, to add the black splash at the bottom right (which actually has subtle story significance). I also didn't like how straight Aida looked on panel 2, so tilted in slightly just to make it more interesting, and added straight borders to the panels using the stroke tool.

9/ Greyscaling: The book is printed in black and white, which allowed for some greyscaling. I was originally just going to finish off with the stark black and white above, but I experimented with the greyscaling and thought it added to the art and atmosphere. All done in photoshop (CS4 incase anyone was interested).

10/ Lettering: This was my first time lettering in Adobe Illustrator, previously just using Photoshop. It look a little bit of learning, but I managed to pick up the basics pretty quickly and much prefer the process and result compared to Photoshop. It's the ease of ability to change and play with the vector lines before finalising or distorting anything that makes the difference. Thanks to this video for the quick reference.

And that's the page finished. Laying it out like this makes it look like a lot of work, but I didn't really notice as I enjoy it so much. Time wise I think I did the 8 pages over about 2 weeks.


So if you want to see the rest of the pages, pick up the 2012: Final prayer anthology. There is some great art and writing in the book and I really enjoyed it myself.


On an altogether different matter, I may have some amusing TV news next week if everything works out...