Transformations...

[sigune]

I started to redraw my comic in my second year of evening classes at art school. As my final project, at the end of the fourth year, I made a little booklet with what I had so far. It has been a rather sobering experience, because my booklet counted ... 31 comics pages. In three years. Of course I did participate in other class projects and I have a fulltime job, but still, you can't say that it has been advancing very well. One of the reasons was that I had trouble with my (normally trusty) Pentel brush pen. It just bled on the paper, which meant I had to work extra slowly and carefully. It took me a while to realise that the problem was in the pen and not in my penmanship :p. On page 28 I finally switched to another Pentel brush pen - the one at the bottom of the picture below. That has made my life a lot easier, and inking has become fun again.

Back when I started drawing The Darkest Hour, I was convinced that this story would be told quickly in some 20 pages. It turned out to be more like 120 pages. And in the redrawing, it's again expanding... In the old pages, like the one in the middle of the photo, everything was so sketchy that I could fit three rows of panels and six speech bubbles into a page. In the neat version, that's just not possible anymore. Sometimes I also added bits here or there to correct the pacing or clarify something. So whereas the old page below was p. 26, the new page below is p. 33. And they look quite, quite different :).

If you are looking to read some Gawain comic, the story is currently being posted on gawaincomic.com, with a new page every Thursday.

You may remember that while I was finishing my booklet for school, I put out some feelers to gauge interest in a printed version. If I haven't pursued it further, it's because I came to the conclusion that there is really little sense in printing The Darkest Hour in multiple smallparts. We'll have to talk again when Ygraine's tale is complete and there is, you know, an entire tale. At about 130 pages it will still be a story that you finish in 15 minutes, at about 1/3 of the size of a manga, so...

Comments

[mywitch.livejournal.com]

That's really beautiful work! Incredibly time-consuming, a big project like that. It's absolutely gorgeous - I can't wait to click that link and see more! :D

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! :D

I only seem to manage to cook up short stories about Snape... The rest are all impossibly long things that take forever. Why must I make my own life so difficult? I don't know. Also, I work with the speed of a particularly slow snail -_-.

Anyway - I hope you enjoy this my second child ;-).

[gingerbred.livejournal.com]

Wow. Phenomenal work. Beautifully done.

Thanks for sharing it. 😊

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! I'm really glad you enjoy the comic <3... Also, welcome!

[gingerbred.livejournal.com]

*blushes* Thing is, I wasn’t explicit enough. I clicked through to your graphic novel (I *can’t* call it a comic), and then devoured the whole thing. And that’s despite it not being my period, or niche, or anything else, but it was just so darn... Gorgeous. Really. *Really* beautifully done.

There. Now I’ve embarrassed both of us. Job done for today. *nods*

(Seriously: wow.)