No sketches this time, but a whole new comics. In my first post to this sketch blog I posted a page of Kamikaze, a short comics I had shelved at the time. Well, the other day I got tired of drawing on the computer and sat down with a brush in hand and completed Kamikaze. It was actually a very nice change, I felt much more in control with a brush than I do with a Wacom. I guess the best solution for me would be to buy a TabletPC or one of those nice CintiQ Wacom screen, both unfortunately very expensive. Of course, I could take the inexpensive route and just draw on paper.

If you haven’t already, go check out Kamikaze now.

Here is a panel from The Raft that I drew today that I’m quite happy with.

In addition I went over some of the earlier pages and fixed stuff that had been bugging me, including the last panel on page 9, shown in the previous post. I decided to switch to a wider pen, which seems to have made me a bit more comfortable. It makes it harder to get into the fine details, but keeps things more loose and flowing.

As the few of who read these pages from time to time might have noticed I’m working on a new comic. It’s called The Raft, and is coming along nicely at the moment. Here is how I go about making it.

First there is the script. I’ve done countless rewrites of it, and the final story is nothing at all like the original idea I started out with. I chose to write the script in the standard format used for screenplays, using a nice little free software called Celtx. The final script was around 29 pages, while the comic will be around 92 pages once done. Here is the script for page 9.

Once I was more or less happy with the script I began drawing a very rough layout for the entire comics. This way I don’t spend much time on each page, and won’t feel uncomfortable about scrapping whole pages if they are not working. I did the rough on paper and photographed it to get it into the computer as I have no scanner. Here is the rough layout for the same page.

After completing the entire rough version of the comics and figuring out how the raft itself and characters should look, it was time to actually begin drawing the comic. I took the rough version into Manga Studio Debut and put it in the background. Drew up the panels, and then sketched up the page with the pencil tool on a new layer.

Finally it was time to ink the page. The nice thing with drawing on the computer is that you have layers, so once the inking was done, it was simply a question of hiding the sketch layer to get rid of it. This is how the final page turned out.

I’m reasonably happy with the result, especially the first couple of panels. The last two could do with some improvements, but there is a limit to how much time you can spend on each page when you have 92 pages to draw.

More character design work for my comic. Here are the main characters, ready for a swimsuit competition.

Things have been moving forward lately with my comic. I just finished a rough sketch version of The Raft. It’s mainly for me to get the layout and framing in place, while ignoring all details. I’m not going to post any of that here, as most of those drawings are horrible…made for my eyes only. The good news is that I’ve begun some character design work and trying to figure out what drawing style to go with for the comics. It needs to both look nice and be something I can manage within a reasonable amount of time. Here are a few different things I’ve tried so far.

This one is probably a bit too detailed and complex, it will be hard for me to keep this style up for 90+ pages witout going insane.

Though I’m no fan of football/soccer, I kind of like this drawing style. I might go for something like this.

Here I experimented a bit with airbrush on the water in the background. I’m not really sure what I’ll use for shading; screen tones, airbrush, hatching or nothing. I’m going to be experimenting a bit more with it to try and figure out what I like best.

Even though it may not seem like it from my very infrequent updates of these pages, I’ve been quite busy lately. I’ve been participating in and helping organize a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender art exhibit during pride week here in Oslo. You can see some of the art from the exhibit on the groups website, incidentally designed by me.

At the exhibit I had the first two pages of my upcoming comic, The Raft. I’m still working on the 7th, and hopefully final, draft of the script for the comic, but skipped a bit ahead in the creation process and drew two complete pages for the exhibit. I’m making good progress on the comic, but don’t expect it to be out until at least next year.