Hi there! Now that I'm not freaking out about the election anymore, I hope to return to my regular, sporadic posting schedule. Last time around, I was trying to figure out the main characters for my minicomic. While we were asked to start coming up with story ideas and work on some rough outlines, we spent some time in class talking about expressiveness and some of the ways a cartoonist can convey emotion. For homework, we had to complete the following worksheet:

This was the first time we actually had to ink an assignment, and putting that pen to the paper was pretty stressful. You can sketch and erase with pencils all day, but once the ink comes out, shit gets permanent. Anyway, I was pretty happy with most of these. I will admit to stealing those weepy manga eyes from a Scott Pilgrim page - I knew what I wanted to do but just couldn't make it look right, so I flipped through for a reference and pretty much copied those. I would do the background differently for Angry, but I like the idea that these are birds who, if pushed to far, will produce teeth specifically to gnash them.

Next we talked about basic perspective and establishing shots--wide shots that are used to give readers a sense of the environment where the story or scene is taking place. Logically enough, our next assignment was to draw and ink a full-page establishing shot.

I never did get around to completely finishing this one, but I'm pretty happy with a lot of the things here. The idea is that the guy on the bottom of the page has to leave his fancy neighborhood and stay temporarily with his friend (who, in later drafts, would become his cousin) in a somewhat crappier part of town. This was originally going to take up the two middle pages of my comic, but I just couldn't afford to lose that many panels, so I'm redrawing it as a half-page panel instead.

Bonus sketch! One of my still-nameless characters, getting his Tim Gunn on.

Up Next: Sequences and storytelling

Previously:

Making a Comic, Part 1
Making a Comic, Part 2
Making a Comic, Part 3