Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Lightning Sketch

Just taking an enforced break due to a violent thunderstorm - I do have surge protection, but I'm not betting my computers against it working in the face of a direct lightning strike.

Birmingham New Street... this train terminates here.

Anyway, thought I'd take a moment to show you this panel I did today, because it's funny what turns out to be most pleasing to draw. The past few pages I've been working on vast, apocalyptic space battles (all the stuff I've really wanted to put in a comic since I first saw Star Wars, in fact), but in the end, it's the real-world stuff that's often most satisfying, perhaps because it takes that little bit more effort to make it convincing - and indeed interesting. I got a similar frisson from doing the tea-pouring panel with Robert Autumn back in issue 2.

Tea & sympathy in St.Mary Mead

I'm pleased with the railway scene because everything looks as if it's occupying 3D space, and I think I did a bit better than usual with the body language - though I'm going to tidy up those guardsmen on the left when I ink them.

Ho hum, rain's stopped... better get back to the grind.
See you in the funny pages.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're right to be pleased. That's a lovely panel - I'd be terrified to ink the bugger!
You gonna post it as you ink and color it?
I'd be well keen to see it progress.
Cheers.

Unknown said...

Ah drat... by the time I read this I'd already finished the colouring, and I haven't preserved many stages in the colouring... it may still be worth doing a step-by-step though. I'll have a look.
It's funny, on the whole I've never felt terribly nervous about inking, perhaps because my pencils are pretty minimal and really don't constitute a finished drawing in themselves. Nowadays, it's even easier, as inking on computer means that I don't obliterate my "pencils" by "inking" over them, and it's all reversible anyway. I also recycle quite a bit of the pencil stage into the inks - most of the straight, "ruled" lines in the background were just copied up to an inking layer and turned black to make the finished drawing.