Sigune's How Not To Draw Comics - Part XI
Monday, 4 September 2006 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siguneSquee! I got very nice comments on the comic recently, from a photographer and a famous architect, among others, so I was pretty flattered and not a little pleased. The gentlemen were not Potter fans, so when they looked at my stuff they referred to Snape as “the lady” (LOL), but I forgave them :D.
No news from Rufftoon yet… But on with the story!
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
Page Seven
Page Eight
You Are Here:
While in the library, Snape, thirsting for revenge, overhears Messrs Padfoot and Wormtail plotting a nocturnal rendez-vous with James Potter by the Whomping Willow. What Snape doesn’t know is that the two Marauders are aware of the fact that their Slytherin enemy is listening in on the conversation, thanks to Evan Rosier accidentally drawing their attention to his presence. Sirius purposefully reveals the Willow’s mechanism, counting on the fact that Snape won’t be able to resist the temptation to put his large nose into the Marauders’ affairs…
14. Flashback
Ah, page nine. I don’t think any part of the comic gave me quite as much trouble as this page, with number fourteen as a close second… For some reason (I have no idea why), I seem to have been worried about this part long before I had actually arrived there – one of my oldest sketch pages for the comic deals with the particular episode that would eventually be depicted on page nine. You can tell its age by the fact that Snape’s robes are the right size; the idea of making them too short and alluding to the poverty of his background came later :D.
As you can see, I first envisioned the layout as having a large Whomping Willow on the right, with Snape getting down into the tunnel as the focus of the whole. The left half of the page would be filled with small panels depicting his sneaking out of the school and getting to the tree. However, though I sort of liked the build-up, I doubted that the small panels would convey what I wanted them to convey, especially when it came to the leaving Hogwarts and crossing the grounds part. The reader would have no idea of the distance between the school and the Willow, and there would be no room for a picture of the grounds. It looked altogether too claustrophobic. The action was too hurried as well, especially since the Whomping Willow is such a great plant and a more detailed confrontation with Snape seemed fun.
Another thing that bothered me about the above sketch was the first panel. I was very much bent on having a picture of Snape wearing the hood of his robes, his face partly obscured, peeping from behind the door to see whether the coast was clear. But unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, I never got that image to work. All sorts of things were wrong: the hood, the way his hair fell, his position with respect to the door, the door opening and more. I failed to visualise the picture properly in my head somehow – I couldn’t find the right angle. I don’t remember whether I ever went looking for photo reference; in any case, I gave up on the panel in the end. I thought I would deal with the problem later, when I had actually arrived at that part of the story.
When I finally did arrive there, I still couldn’t figure out how to deal with the episode. That’s why, after a few failed attempts at Snape-in-a-hood, I got distracted and started doodling for a later page :D…
15. How To Cope With Things Not Working
I’ll be up front about it: I don’t like page nine. Some of it is blech. I will list my objections below; they’re personal and I don’t know how apparent they will be to others. On the positive side, though, it could have looked worse. It was quite horrible before I inked it. Now it’s just – unsatisfactory. But first things first.
It took me the longest time to determine the layout of the page. First, I decided to spread the sequence from Snape’s leaving the castle until his entering the tunnel under the Willow over no less than three pages. Second, I got stuck.
It is normal for some time to pass between my making one page and the next. Drawing comics (at least the way I do it; I can’t speak for other people) is very labour-intensive. Sometimes a month or more goes by that I don’t even think about the whole project. From June 2004 until now I have drawn no more than seventeen pages. Mostly that is because I have plenty of other things to do as well and simply can’t find the time to work on the comic. Now and then, it is because the Layout Muse forsakes me ;). With page nine, I grew positively desperate. I couldn’t wait to move on with the story, but I didn’t know how. Maybe it’s one of the funny side effects of working without a scenario. I knew that Snape was supposed to get to the Willow, push the knot and get inside – surely it couldn’t be too difficult. But it was.
Then one day while I was at work (I know I must have been at work because that is the only place where I have one of those tiny square writing pads) and doodling (*ahem*) it just came to me.
I had introduced Wilkes and started to toy with him as a character. Having brought him in and set him up as Snape’s friend, I could not just let him disappear without a word, especially because I wanted to make it clear that Snape had a choice in the werewolf debacle. Nobody forced him to go to the Willow; and nobody forced him to go on his own. There is little love lost between myself and the Marauders, but I wouldn’t want to exonerate Snape either, and as everything had to be compact, I thought I could use Wilkes to illustrate a way in which Snape might to some extent bring accidents upon himself. He seems to me to be the type who says he doesn’t need anyone, and, when things go wrong, complains that nobody was there to help him. I could see Wilkes trying to make up for the Slytherins’ censure of Snape in the library scene, so I decided to give him a few lines to that effect – and comment on Severus’ smoking habit in one go ;). Of course Snape, angry at the fact that his friend took Rosier’s part in the censure issue, rejects Wilkes’s effort at reconciliation and chooses to go after the Marauders on his own. I made a tiny thumbnail with the page layout as I saw it then:
As you can see, half of the page would consist of a conversation between Wilkes and Snape; then would come a larger version of the panel I had been struggling with before, namely of Snape peering round the door before sneaking out; and finally I’d have a large panel of Snape crossing the Hogwarts grounds, with the rising full moon in the background.
At that point I either remembered how the combination Snape + door had always failed to look good, or I just thought that rather than sneaky he should look triumphant in anticipation of his presumed victory over the Marauders. In any case, I thought it would be nice to depict him as swinging the doors open instead of slipping through a crack. As you can tell by the quick sketches, though, that wasn’t going to be easy either :D…
I started sketching for the lower half of the page first, and at once ran into problems. I liked the Snape who has both his hands on the same door, but I couldn’t see how he was supposed to be positioned in relation to that door. It was a nice picture, but I didn’t know what I was drawing :D. I also liked the running Snape in three-quarter perspective, but there I couldn’t get his left hand to look good. Frustration abounded. I turned my attention to the upper half of the page, in the hope that this would be a bit easier to manage.
I constructed the dialogue in these sketches, like I often do. Wilkes would be sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, and Snape would walk away from him. (Armchairs usually give me some trouble, as you can see, but hey, there has to be something in the panel, right?).
The very ugly, very panicky Snape at the top is a study for a later page :D.
Anyway: things didn’t look too promising, did they? I’m bad at armchairs and I added an armchair. I couldn’t figure out how Snape would look opening a door, but he had to open a door. I had problems with my running Snape as well. Oh, and I’m pretty bad at landscapes. So here is what I ended up with:
Okay, the positive things first…
I like the final layout. If you compare the top strip to the one I sketched in the thumbnail, you’ll notice that instead of making the first two panels the same size, I changed the arrangement to have longer and longer panels, to suggest Snape walking away from Wilkes. That is good. Shortening the first panel also allowed me to elongate the one underneath it, which was nice because it allowed more swinging of doors ;).
I think I managed to make Snape look fine in the end; I swung from a doorpost in front of a mirror in order to see what the pose had to look like :P.
The panel bottom left is actually the single most reference-aided picture of the whole comic: the staircase of the hall behind Snape is based on a photograph of the Castle of Le Roeulx’s eighteenth-century double staircase – not very Hogwesian in spirit, I guess, but a double staircase just looked nice in the background, or so I thought.
(I posted this page at deviantART first, as a primer, and in a comment there,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sscrewdriver rightly pointed out that the stairs at Hogwarts should look used. Also, the simple perspective jars with the movement of Snape’s body. The image didn’t work for her, and I can see why… But I have a long way to go before I’ll know the tricks that give movement not just to a body, but to a building as well. My backgrounds usually look stiff and static. I think you can tell that I hate doing them, and struggle with them a lot.)
The armchair turned out all right. I had some discussion withbettyboop_comic as to whether I should cross-hatch it to make it more leathery-looking, but I decided against that because I liked the contrast. I also thought that more cross-hatching would drown the figure of Wilkes, and I adore Wilkesy.
Oh, and I do like the wall and the fireplace. But that’s about it.
Now for what annoys me:
Snape is having a Bad Hair Day throughout the page. Yes, I know, his hair isn’t really supposed to look good at the best of times, but still – there is something I don’t like about how it looks in every single picture except the one where he opens the door.
Wilkes isn’t nearly as handsome as he was on page seven.
I really, really don’t like Snape’s eye in the panel top right.
I don’t like how my landscapes come out. Blech. I do my best, but they never seem to live, and so this one doesn’t either. Oh, I don’t know… Maybe I should start using photo reference. I don’t feel as if I have enough imagination to create an imaginary landscape. The results never make me happy. I felt the same about the landscape in the drawing I did for_grainne_ - it’s too cold and it doesn’t breathe.
All the things I dislike became evident while I was working on this page. I saw them, but somehow I couldn’t fix them. The pencils looked worse, so I did manage to improve some of it, but… Well, I guess I just have to live with how it looks. I don’t know how rational or irrational my scepticism looks to you; I only know that I can’t help feeling that some elements of this drawing should have looked better, but don’t :/.
So, all in all this is one of the pages (if not the page) of the comic that I like least. The next, however, is one of those that I like best :D…
Next: Wizard Meets Willow.
No news from Rufftoon yet… But on with the story!
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
Page Seven
Page Eight
You Are Here:
While in the library, Snape, thirsting for revenge, overhears Messrs Padfoot and Wormtail plotting a nocturnal rendez-vous with James Potter by the Whomping Willow. What Snape doesn’t know is that the two Marauders are aware of the fact that their Slytherin enemy is listening in on the conversation, thanks to Evan Rosier accidentally drawing their attention to his presence. Sirius purposefully reveals the Willow’s mechanism, counting on the fact that Snape won’t be able to resist the temptation to put his large nose into the Marauders’ affairs…
14. Flashback
Ah, page nine. I don’t think any part of the comic gave me quite as much trouble as this page, with number fourteen as a close second… For some reason (I have no idea why), I seem to have been worried about this part long before I had actually arrived there – one of my oldest sketch pages for the comic deals with the particular episode that would eventually be depicted on page nine. You can tell its age by the fact that Snape’s robes are the right size; the idea of making them too short and alluding to the poverty of his background came later :D.
As you can see, I first envisioned the layout as having a large Whomping Willow on the right, with Snape getting down into the tunnel as the focus of the whole. The left half of the page would be filled with small panels depicting his sneaking out of the school and getting to the tree. However, though I sort of liked the build-up, I doubted that the small panels would convey what I wanted them to convey, especially when it came to the leaving Hogwarts and crossing the grounds part. The reader would have no idea of the distance between the school and the Willow, and there would be no room for a picture of the grounds. It looked altogether too claustrophobic. The action was too hurried as well, especially since the Whomping Willow is such a great plant and a more detailed confrontation with Snape seemed fun.
Another thing that bothered me about the above sketch was the first panel. I was very much bent on having a picture of Snape wearing the hood of his robes, his face partly obscured, peeping from behind the door to see whether the coast was clear. But unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, I never got that image to work. All sorts of things were wrong: the hood, the way his hair fell, his position with respect to the door, the door opening and more. I failed to visualise the picture properly in my head somehow – I couldn’t find the right angle. I don’t remember whether I ever went looking for photo reference; in any case, I gave up on the panel in the end. I thought I would deal with the problem later, when I had actually arrived at that part of the story.
When I finally did arrive there, I still couldn’t figure out how to deal with the episode. That’s why, after a few failed attempts at Snape-in-a-hood, I got distracted and started doodling for a later page :D…
15. How To Cope With Things Not Working
I’ll be up front about it: I don’t like page nine. Some of it is blech. I will list my objections below; they’re personal and I don’t know how apparent they will be to others. On the positive side, though, it could have looked worse. It was quite horrible before I inked it. Now it’s just – unsatisfactory. But first things first.
It took me the longest time to determine the layout of the page. First, I decided to spread the sequence from Snape’s leaving the castle until his entering the tunnel under the Willow over no less than three pages. Second, I got stuck.
It is normal for some time to pass between my making one page and the next. Drawing comics (at least the way I do it; I can’t speak for other people) is very labour-intensive. Sometimes a month or more goes by that I don’t even think about the whole project. From June 2004 until now I have drawn no more than seventeen pages. Mostly that is because I have plenty of other things to do as well and simply can’t find the time to work on the comic. Now and then, it is because the Layout Muse forsakes me ;). With page nine, I grew positively desperate. I couldn’t wait to move on with the story, but I didn’t know how. Maybe it’s one of the funny side effects of working without a scenario. I knew that Snape was supposed to get to the Willow, push the knot and get inside – surely it couldn’t be too difficult. But it was.
Then one day while I was at work (I know I must have been at work because that is the only place where I have one of those tiny square writing pads) and doodling (*ahem*) it just came to me.
I had introduced Wilkes and started to toy with him as a character. Having brought him in and set him up as Snape’s friend, I could not just let him disappear without a word, especially because I wanted to make it clear that Snape had a choice in the werewolf debacle. Nobody forced him to go to the Willow; and nobody forced him to go on his own. There is little love lost between myself and the Marauders, but I wouldn’t want to exonerate Snape either, and as everything had to be compact, I thought I could use Wilkes to illustrate a way in which Snape might to some extent bring accidents upon himself. He seems to me to be the type who says he doesn’t need anyone, and, when things go wrong, complains that nobody was there to help him. I could see Wilkes trying to make up for the Slytherins’ censure of Snape in the library scene, so I decided to give him a few lines to that effect – and comment on Severus’ smoking habit in one go ;). Of course Snape, angry at the fact that his friend took Rosier’s part in the censure issue, rejects Wilkes’s effort at reconciliation and chooses to go after the Marauders on his own. I made a tiny thumbnail with the page layout as I saw it then:
As you can see, half of the page would consist of a conversation between Wilkes and Snape; then would come a larger version of the panel I had been struggling with before, namely of Snape peering round the door before sneaking out; and finally I’d have a large panel of Snape crossing the Hogwarts grounds, with the rising full moon in the background.
At that point I either remembered how the combination Snape + door had always failed to look good, or I just thought that rather than sneaky he should look triumphant in anticipation of his presumed victory over the Marauders. In any case, I thought it would be nice to depict him as swinging the doors open instead of slipping through a crack. As you can tell by the quick sketches, though, that wasn’t going to be easy either :D…
I started sketching for the lower half of the page first, and at once ran into problems. I liked the Snape who has both his hands on the same door, but I couldn’t see how he was supposed to be positioned in relation to that door. It was a nice picture, but I didn’t know what I was drawing :D. I also liked the running Snape in three-quarter perspective, but there I couldn’t get his left hand to look good. Frustration abounded. I turned my attention to the upper half of the page, in the hope that this would be a bit easier to manage.
I constructed the dialogue in these sketches, like I often do. Wilkes would be sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, and Snape would walk away from him. (Armchairs usually give me some trouble, as you can see, but hey, there has to be something in the panel, right?).
The very ugly, very panicky Snape at the top is a study for a later page :D.
Anyway: things didn’t look too promising, did they? I’m bad at armchairs and I added an armchair. I couldn’t figure out how Snape would look opening a door, but he had to open a door. I had problems with my running Snape as well. Oh, and I’m pretty bad at landscapes. So here is what I ended up with:
Okay, the positive things first…
I like the final layout. If you compare the top strip to the one I sketched in the thumbnail, you’ll notice that instead of making the first two panels the same size, I changed the arrangement to have longer and longer panels, to suggest Snape walking away from Wilkes. That is good. Shortening the first panel also allowed me to elongate the one underneath it, which was nice because it allowed more swinging of doors ;).
I think I managed to make Snape look fine in the end; I swung from a doorpost in front of a mirror in order to see what the pose had to look like :P.
The panel bottom left is actually the single most reference-aided picture of the whole comic: the staircase of the hall behind Snape is based on a photograph of the Castle of Le Roeulx’s eighteenth-century double staircase – not very Hogwesian in spirit, I guess, but a double staircase just looked nice in the background, or so I thought.
(I posted this page at deviantART first, as a primer, and in a comment there,
sscrewdriver rightly pointed out that the stairs at Hogwarts should look used. Also, the simple perspective jars with the movement of Snape’s body. The image didn’t work for her, and I can see why… But I have a long way to go before I’ll know the tricks that give movement not just to a body, but to a building as well. My backgrounds usually look stiff and static. I think you can tell that I hate doing them, and struggle with them a lot.)The armchair turned out all right. I had some discussion with
bettyboop_comic as to whether I should cross-hatch it to make it more leathery-looking, but I decided against that because I liked the contrast. I also thought that more cross-hatching would drown the figure of Wilkes, and I adore Wilkesy.Oh, and I do like the wall and the fireplace. But that’s about it.
Now for what annoys me:
Snape is having a Bad Hair Day throughout the page. Yes, I know, his hair isn’t really supposed to look good at the best of times, but still – there is something I don’t like about how it looks in every single picture except the one where he opens the door.
Wilkes isn’t nearly as handsome as he was on page seven.
I really, really don’t like Snape’s eye in the panel top right.
I don’t like how my landscapes come out. Blech. I do my best, but they never seem to live, and so this one doesn’t either. Oh, I don’t know… Maybe I should start using photo reference. I don’t feel as if I have enough imagination to create an imaginary landscape. The results never make me happy. I felt the same about the landscape in the drawing I did for
_grainne_ - it’s too cold and it doesn’t breathe.All the things I dislike became evident while I was working on this page. I saw them, but somehow I couldn’t fix them. The pencils looked worse, so I did manage to improve some of it, but… Well, I guess I just have to live with how it looks. I don’t know how rational or irrational my scepticism looks to you; I only know that I can’t help feeling that some elements of this drawing should have looked better, but don’t :/.
So, all in all this is one of the pages (if not the page) of the comic that I like least. The next, however, is one of those that I like best :D…
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Tuesday, 5 September 2006 10:23 am (UTC)It's too bad JKR isn't more of an artist: how cool would stories of the Marauders be in graphic form?!
they referred to Snape as “the lady” (LOL), but I forgave them :D.
Not your fault - it's Snape himself - the guy wears dress like robes and shoulder length hair... even JKR couldn't resist putting him in drag in book three! XD
Truth be told I'm crap at drawing robes - which is why I hardly ever draw an entire Snape... My first stories I created as a youngster were all in basic comic strip form on an A4 page, but as the characters were animals they were a whole lot easier for me to draw than people!
no subject
Date: Thursday, 7 September 2006 03:50 pm (UTC)I wish she's let me do them XD! (LOL)
I usent to like the idea of drawing robes at all - I thought they'd all look the same. But I find that the fact that everybody wears robes forces me to be more creative with the details; plus, robes can be used to great effect.
Animals are easy?! For me they're horribly difficult :)!
no subject
Date: Thursday, 7 September 2006 06:50 pm (UTC)*shudder*
Well the world would be boring if everyone had the same talents! ;o)
I was drawing animals long before I was drawing people. I still have a really cute picture of a group of snails I drew when I was 3 years old... XD
And that's my tiger drawing on my userpic. ;oP