The comic I produced for options (above) was the first of a two part series, as my proposed story was too long. It was called ‘The rise and fall of Keth the Manosaur’. It was the story of a T-rex that was born with human arms and thus outcast from the pack. The story follows his journey as he looks for a new home and eventually travels to Hollywood to pursue an acting career. Keth soon discovers that there is no place for him there either, and ends up in a one room flat with a dead end job, eventually spiralling in to drugs and alcoholism. Finally Keth ends up caught up with the mob, and it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. I got quite excited at the beginning and eager to get a story down so it was fairly rushed. Although I was and still am happy with it, as I was working on the final product and it was too late to make major changes to the plot I kept having more ideas, so perhaps spending a little more time on the story would be wise this time. The book was an ambitious 28 A5 pages in full colour, including front and back covers. Next time I propose to do it in traditional comic book size so it looks more professional. I found myself rushing towards the end and am afraid that the quality may have suffered as a consequence so I intend to take more time over thoroughly planning my time at the beginning and ensuring that I stick to it religiously.
As I have a bad habit of getting to eager and rushing, after writing the story I spent a lot of time designing all the proposed characters and deciding on a suitable medium to work in. I knew from the outset that I wanted it to be hand drawn and in colour, and I then decided on using a dip pen and ink as opposed to fine liner as this kept it freer and less sterile. My next task was deciding on how I would colour it. I’ve never been excellent with a paintbrush, and I didn’t think that it would compliment the work well. I also ruled out a few other ideas like pastels, collage, etc. In the past I have always been a fan of felt tips, because they’re bright, imprecise and have an almost infantile connotation to them, which I think juxtaposes the content of my work well. I have also done some work using Photoshop to colour, which I have liked a lot although I was concerned about running the risk of it looking too polished. Another contender was coloured pencil. I then had the idea that perhaps the characters arms could be photographic, as I like mixing things up a bit and creating a contrast (without things becoming too confusing), so I then created a number of examples to lay out together. I had pencil, felt tips and Photoshop, each with drawn arms and another set with photographic arms on top. I spent a while puzzling over these and as I was struggling to make a decision, I decided to do something I should definitely do more often and take in to account the practicalities of it all. I decided that that photographic arms were potentially complicated time consuming and also possibly limit the flexibility of the character. I finally decided also that I would use felt tips because the pencils might look a bit unprofessional and erratic and that on he contrary Photoshop may look almost too polished and professional for the content of my book, and I also like the more ‘hand done’ element. My decision may have also been influenced by my existing fondness for felt tips and also the fact that while looking for a good set I discovered some called ‘Copic Ciao’, they were expensive but after trying them out and seeing how amazing they were I bought a set. What better excuse for a student to now have to use them, right? Well, suffice to say that this ended up backfiring on me a bit, but I’ll discuss that later. These were the best felt tip pens I’d ever used, they have a thick tapered felt end and when used gives an almost watercolour paint effect but with more control, and once you’ve got used to using them you don’t get any blobs or imperfections. You can also lay colours on top of one another to get great shading and shadow effect.
While I was making this tough decision I commenced with the storyboarding. I believe this to be an integral part to the success of creating a book, but it did prove to be fairly difficult and time consuming, which I think was detrimental my amount of support work. This is something I think I may struggle to get around, as this and the final production of the book are both extremely time consuming, making my margin for creative support work less. One way, which I could perhaps lessen the time spent storyboarding is by rather than storyboarding and then creating a mock up book demonstrating the layout to make sure it works is to create a mock up book first with the initial storyboard presented there. However the difficulty there would lie in knowing how long the mock up would need to be in the first place. Another thing I found time consuming about the storyboarding was the measuring of each page and hope to perhaps find an application that can automate a suitable layout.
The next thing to do was to start the final images. I began drawing the images double the size, and each frame on a separate sheet, however it soon became apparent that if I continued down that route, my pens would run out after almost every page and this would prove unaffordable. I had planned to draw them that way, scan them all in and then put them together on Photoshop to have them printed, but when I scanned the first few images in I discovered that the colour quality was compromised on the computer and when printed. For these two reasons I decided to change my approach; work on them actual size and instead of scan and print them I was going to copy them (although I did later came to the conclusion that it was the quality of my scanner and printer). Another thing I did wrong was I didn’t do a bleed on the pages where I wanted the colour to go to the edge, it didn’t matter with the story pages as the edges were white, but it caused me problems later on, so this time it is something I will definitely remember. Something I noticed when reviewing the pages is that the very first page (the one using the double size approach) where it has been stretched the lines are very thin and precise. It looks a lot different and more polished than the rest of the pages. I think I prefer the thick and almost messier lines of the rest of the book as it gives it a suitable roughness, although believe that due to this I now understand the process better.
These are things I suppose I should have researched prior, but I now have a book called ‘Understanding Comics’ by Illustrator Scott McCloud (McCloud, 1994) and I also now know that a standard comic book size is 17 X 26 cm, that the images would be drawn at least double the size on paper a little larger to allow for a 3mm bleed, penned and then inked. Next time I think that I would still work to scale to keep the roughness and authenticity of the line, especially if I use pens again as they proved extremely expensive due to their poor longevity. Certainly though I would chose to work to a more traditional size and allow for a bleed. In hindsight I also believe that there is a great amount of room for improvement in my text used. My handwriting is often fairly scruffy, although that might seem suited to the work and for the reason that I like to avoid generics, it ended up just looking rather unprofessional and sometimes the legibility is even somewhat questionable.
I wish that I could say that this is where my difficulties ended, but it would be more fitting to say that it’s where they really began! My main issue was the final printing and production, which I was also struggling to complete in a day due to my sub par time management. I had decided that for the options project, I would print them myself as getting them done professionally would be costly. I thought if I scanned the images in as respective A4 pages that I would be able to print them out, and then print on the back of them, finally stapling them together. After a number of hours in the photography suite scanning my images at 300 DPI in what I thought was the correct order, I went to get them printed. Firstly, I could not get access to a printer on which I could print both sides of the paper, so when it didn’t work I assumed that was the reason why. I cut the pages up and stuck them on to my mock up to create a working, but very rough, booklet. Despite the disappointment of not having a properly printed comic book, I was pleased with the work.
These are things I suppose I should have researched prior, but I now have a book called ‘Understanding Comics’ by Illustrator Scott McCloud (McCloud, 1994) and I also now know that a standard comic book size is 17 X 26 cm, that the images would be drawn at least double the size on paper a little larger to allow for a 3mm bleed, penned and then inked. Next time I think that I would still work to scale to keep the roughness and authenticity of the line, especially if I use pens again as they proved extremely expensive due to their poor longevity. Certainly though I would chose to work to a more traditional size and allow for a bleed. In hindsight I also believe that there is a great amount of room for improvement in my text used. My handwriting is often fairly scruffy, although that might seem suited to the work and for the reason that I like to avoid generics, it ended up just looking rather unprofessional and sometimes the legibility is even somewhat questionable.
I wish that I could say that this is where my difficulties ended, but it would be more fitting to say that it’s where they really began! My main issue was the final printing and production, which I was also struggling to complete in a day due to my sub par time management. I had decided that for the options project, I would print them myself as getting them done professionally would be costly. I thought if I scanned the images in as respective A4 pages that I would be able to print them out, and then print on the back of them, finally stapling them together. After a number of hours in the photography suite scanning my images at 300 DPI in what I thought was the correct order, I went to get them printed. Firstly, I could not get access to a printer on which I could print both sides of the paper, so when it didn’t work I assumed that was the reason why. I cut the pages up and stuck them on to my mock up to create a working, but very rough, booklet. Despite the disappointment of not having a properly printed comic book, I was pleased with the work.
I decided to pursue getting it printed after the deadline, experiencing yet more problems. I took it to reprographics, assuming that I would simply be able to hand over the images and have it printed, but I was told firstly that the images that went to the edges would need a bleed and that the files would have to be saved in to PDF files (turns out this actually meant all of them in one PDF file in the correct order). Once I’d figured this out I went back again and had a sample printed, but the pages were still in the wrong order! I couldn’t understand what I’d done wrong. I was told I could try to rectify the order and go back, but I had another problem, which was that for the professional quality printers my images should have been scanned at a minimum of 600 DPI, making the images pixelated and the text almost illegible so I was basically back to square one. I still haven’t completed the printing process for ‘The rise and all of Keth the Manosaur’ but it’s something that I intend to do because I think it would be valuable work for my portfolio. I have a non-stapled, black and white copy of the sample from reprographics to enable me to figure out what went wrong and fix the problem, the colour quality was so much better printing on their printers so professional printing is definitely the way forward. What I will have to do is to go back to the originals and create a bleed on the necessary pages, digitally on the end papers. Secondly, I would have to scan the images at 600 DPI and save them as PDF files 3mm bigger than my target size. Once I had done this I would have to save the individual pages in the correct size and order in to a single PDF file and take them with the mock up to the printers and have a sample re-printed. It will cost more having them edit the pages together for me, because it’s something that I could do myself, and is probably worth me giving another try by dissecting the black and white sample book. However, I also think it’s worth considering all the problems I’ve experienced with it already. Either way, I have learnt an awful lot from the whole process and intend to apply the knowledge I now have of comic book production.
I think that perhaps such a thorough and long-winded review prerequisites a brief summary, so in short these are the things that I would do this differently this time around:
· Time manage more effectively, allowing more time for final production and any errors therein.
· Work to traditional comic book size, either to scale or double size with appropriate sized bleeds.
· Find an application that will enable me to create my pages with correct measurements with more ease.
· Improve my text.
· Make sure to scan at a minimum of 600 DPI.
· Save files in a single PDF.
Ta for reading,
Quim out!
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