Tests!

I used the opportunity of a commission for my best friend to test out how the colouring method described before prints, and to see how well I could use Glow in the Dark Fimo to create glowing eyes on a plushie, as the Tailypo creature is described as having glowing eyes.

I was expecting the print-out to be pixellated, but it actually worked out very well, and though I did not get a photo in complete darkness the glowing eyes of the plushie are still noticeable.

A Dog!

The man in the story has 3 dogs, so the obvious place to go for reference would be my dog. She's a Collie cross something or other that looks a bit like a terrier and completely dominates the Collie genes. Because there is no way this dog looks like a Collie. I think she would be fantastic to model the dogs in the story on because of her eyebrows. She has an incredibly expressive face with those big white bushy eyebrows. The second video, of her eating a carrot, really shows off her brows.

Since she's very old now and doesn't move quite like she used to - just sleeps - I've combed through old videos and photos of her for references from a range of different angles and actions.

Creature Designs

I like the blank eye and the details around it. I love the ear. I like the high back and the small paws. I am not fond of the snout at all. I think it should be shorter. Quite creepy looking, which is good, as the story is a creepy one. Too creepy? I'm wondering if the eyes should be bigger?

 This version worked out very well, in my opinion. It is unique compared to the usual designs of the Tailypo creature. Combined features of a hyena, aardvark and alligator make a sort of bat-like appearance. I like the addition of the 'beard' on the chin, too. I will keep the hyena-style body with the high back and small hind quarters and then, obviously, a long tail. There is still potential to show the Cheshire Cat type grin with this design, but I'm planning on only showing that when the creature is about to attack near the end of the story. It was tempting to add antlers to the design, as in my rough sketch ont he original storyboard, but I decided this was too much.

 Colour test. Seeing if the method in the Copper tutorial works for my work. I was nervous about reducing hte lineart to purely black pixels with no anti aliasing, but it actually works quite well. Cross hatching complicates the process from what is described int he tutorial - it makes some areas impossible to select with the magic wand, but these can be painted seperately.

A Tailypo Plushie

I cannot resist the idea of making a plushie of the Tailypo creature (with a detachable tail! I'm thinking magnets!). In this project I intend to create a range of different 2D and 3D pieces, and I definitely want to improve my plushie making skills. As I mentioned in some of my research, the challenge will be in producing a plushie design which elements that allow for a high evel of customisation in order to make the plushies relate well to my illustrations.

The options are:

Using felt. I can cut out and sew, or needlefelt, shapes in felt mimicking the designs of an illustration for areas such as facial features.
Super Sculpey. A polymer clay that hardens when baked to become sandable, drillable, etc. I can carve 3D features inspired by my style of illustration for the story in mind.
Printing onto fabric. I can either buy fabric that can run through an ordinary printer, or buy some transfer paper, or use screen printing to get a 2D image onto fabric that can then be made into or added to a 3D plushie design. This would be a good method to use for future pieces from Chinese folklore, as in my visits to the Pitt Rivers museum I noticed a lot of Chinese fabric toys with the designs painted on.

I have made a very quick and small (and accidentally horrifyingly creepy) example plushie with both felt and Super Sculpey details.

I created the mouth out of Super Sculpey by making a mould from a badger skull mybrother found in the woods, and then painting the teeth white. If you ignore just how creepy this result is, it shows that I can add high customised details with both felt and Sculpey in order to link my plushie creations to the illustrations that inspired them.

The Tailypo Creature

Above are the previous inspirations for the creature design in 'Tailypo' (the creature is never actually named as Tailypo, it is looking for it's tailypo. The creature has no name). I liked the Cheshire Cat grin on the black and white one, by SelfRightousSuiside and the blank eyes. I also loved the designs by TurtleShelltered, as they deviate from the usual portrayals of the Tailypo creature, and have large, round glowing eyes. They are the only designs I have come across that don't look roughly the same as every other design (like the first image here, by Michael Wandelmaier.)

I would prefer to be original in my designs of the creature, like TurtleShelltered, rather than offer up a version of the over-used design. Including a Cheshire Cat-style grin could potentially look amazing.
 

 

Above: The Cheshire Cat from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and a sketch by Joshua Kenfield. I love the blue glowing eyes of the cat, and the really wide grin. It is quite subtly creepy. What I love about the sketch is the side-view, showing how far back the grin pulls the face. It is creepier than the front view.

 Style-wise, I love this piece by Viktor Miller-Gausa. The hatching is an effective method of shading the fur, leaving areas white for the highlights. The ears of the hares fit in well with designs for the Tailypo creature, and I love the way he has drawn the limbs.

As for my design of the creature, I will look back on my observation drawings from the Natural History Museum in Oxford. I will take pieces of various animals and 'stitch them together' to create one.

 

 I have picked out these particular pages for the elements of animals I will potentially use. I like the armadillo's body - I think it would be really interesting to draw as part of an unusual creature, and would offer an amazing pattern and texture for the scenes in which the creature appears. I like the ears of the hare, the hyena and the aardvark. The alligator's jaws would make a menacing mouth, and I like that a few teeth poke through or hang over the jaws. I like the body and markings of the hyena, with the high back, and the general face shape, and I like the paws and head of the fox.

I have tried copy-pasting various elements in Photoshop to inspire my creature designs.

Just a little bit... STRANGE.

I actually quite like the combination of the hyena and alligator! The ears are cute, though if I were to keep them I would have to change the proportions. The creature is often described and drawn as having very long ears, and I really like the effect in Viktor Miller-Gausa'a work above.

More Tailypo Character Designing

 

The face that worked well.

 I tried to tweak the style a little bit to see if I could come up with any results that I like, and that more suit the image I have in my head for the other outcomes. The first one looks... psychotic. But I liked the effect of circling the eyes for deep shadows, making him look tired and older. The second attempt came out very well. I like the proportion of the eyes to the head - if rounded eyes get too big they look very manga-ish, which isn't what I'm going for at all. The big nose suits him. He looks vaguely terrified, which is suitable too.
 

Here I was trying out shading with cross hatching and block shading. I like how the cross hatching experiment came out - it allows me to show more contours of his face without adding too many extra detailing lines, which would make him look far too old, and the face more complicated and harder to read. The block shading and cross hatching one works, but I don't think I would like to do an entire comic with it. I think it would work well for scenes with a prominent light source, for example cooking the rabbit on a fire, or scenes with high emotion, like when he is scared of the creature.

Facial hair style! The shape of the first beard is inspired by pieces by Charlene le Scanff. I think it works really well witht he style of the face. More detail can be added within the lines of the beard (I always love detail). The second one, as you may be able to tell by the fact it is not even finished, does not work so well in my opinion. I think it would have worked with the original styling of the face, but the way I have drawn it now, which I intend to keep, doesn't suit it. I might be able to combine the two: have the shape of the first one with the detailing of the second.

Thoughts on Colouring

My plan is to colour the comic digitally. I will shade everything in the style of comics, with high contrast in the light and shade. I will experiment with how half-tone shading and cross-hatching work within my drawings. I will de-saturate background objects to create the illusion of depth, as in the Batman comics I referenced earlier. The colour scheme will be mostly cool colours, as it takes place outdoors and at night, and he is in a bleak situation- with accents of warm colours. This works really well in pieces by Sam Bosma; his comics have a mixture of cool-coloured panels with warm accents and warm-coloured panels with cool accents. The man's skin colour will be one of the warm coloured accents, in the colouring style of Norman Rockwell. I will also look closely at Rockwell's pieces for his portrayals of emotion, and for a better idea of the man's facial shape in the next set of character designs. Panels with high emotion, such as the fear of the creature or the creature's anger will be warm-coloured with cool accents.

Sam Bosma

A lot of comics use flat colours rather than fully "painting" the whole range of colour and tone, I expect in order to save time, since there are a lot of panels and scenes, so it would be too time consuming to meticulously colour each drawing. This will also be a good strategy for me, since this comic will have quite a few pages, and a lot of panels within those pages. I plan to create as many final pieces as possible for this project, so time is an issue. I have also only recently tried colouring digitally, so any attempts I make to improve my digital painting skills should be left out of the final pieces. Mostly flat colours will be more than enough.


 I found this tutorial on colouring a comic digitally with a technique I may try, as it sounds a little more simplified than my attempts at teaching myself in the past: Copper: Step-by-Step Process, by Kazu Kibuishi

Kibuishi pencils his comic in a coloured pencil, which he can then easily remove from the scan with Hue+Saturation. He inks using a mixture of fineliner and dip pen - I will be using a mixture of fineliner and brush pen. On the computer, he sets the linework itself to multiply; In my prevous attempts at colouring, I would set the colours to multiply, which would cause problems with multiple layers. He uses Image>Adjustments>Threshold to turn the lineart purely black and white with no anti-aliasing, so then he can use the magic wand tool to select areas and colour them individually.

I will definitely try this technique, as it sounds a lot faster and more effective then my previous attempts at digital colouring, and it is well suited to using flat colours. The final results of the Copper Comic look very well done - I would have been nervous about getting rid of the anti-aliasing, effectively reducing the lineart to pixel art, but it obvious works well for Copper. I will try it out.

Initial "Tailypo" Character Designs

These are my intial sketches for the man in the Tailypo tale. My thoughts were that he lives in the woods, secluded, so he could have a certain stereotypical lumberjack-ish style to him - facial hair, muscular arms, clothing: plaid shirt, jeans, boots. I imagined him being middle-aged to old, so he should have a few lines on his face. His motivation in the story is that he is hungry, and food is scarce, so he should be thin. It will be quite difficult to balance 'thin' with 'muscular arms'. Brings to mind one of the common character shapes in animation - large chest and tiny legs. Since he is both aging and hungry, he should look tired. I figured since in the story he lives alone in a secluded wood, and rarely goes to a town, he would not care about his appearance, so he would appear untidy.


I wanted him to have very rounded eyes, and I used the pupil style of the Fleischer animations. I will try out the rounded simplified limbs of the Fleischer animations too, but I am not sure how well they will work. I prefer the larger, rounded and simplified ears to my shoddy attempt to draw a some-what realistic on on Face 1. I have not yet decided between a full beard and mutton chops. I like that the mutton chops allow me to draw some stubble, too, and they wouldn't cover up the mouth, which offers some clues as to emotion. However, all the emotional cues being centrered around the eyes and eyebrows might be an effective solution too.

I think Face 1 looks a little too old-man-ish, and Face 3 looks a little hill-billy-ish, so I would like to aim for a middle ground between them.

 I like this face (above) a lot more, and it works in the side view too, which makes me happy. I think the full beard actually does work well, leaving all emotional cues around the eyes. He should have big, obvious eyebrows for this. I might still play around with style, but I am quite happy with this.
Body type: Doing limbs inspired by the Fleischer animations doesn't work well with muscular arms and a small body. I've never thought they looked good even on the muscular Fleischer characters, so my woodsman may have to be skinny all over (top left). Here, the simplified curvy limbs inspired by Fleischer do work well.

I also looked back at some of my artist research to this piece by Tyson Murphy, where his character has huge arms but a tiny body, and tried something like it above (bottom right). I don't mind this outcome - it needs more work - and it works well in Tyson Murphy's piece, but I think I might save using that body type for if and when I get around to doing some of the lumberjack folklore.

Come to think of it, clothing-wise Tyson's character is appropriate too. A quick image search for Lumberjack yielded almost entirely the image of facial hair, a red plaid shirt, jeans and boots.

He's a lumberjack and he's okay

Laying Out A Comic

Tutorials galore! :

Paneling, pacing and layout in comics and manga by 'Rikvah' (1)
Paneling, pacing and layout in comics and manga (2)
"Camera Choices" by David Petersen
Comic panel / layout tutorial by 'Maggock'
Wally Woods' 22 panels that always work

Summary of findings:

• "Intentional controlled variety" to panels.
• Pacing - affected by writing, art, layout.
• Illusion of time created by the time it take for the eye to travel across the page.
• The eye will linger on larger panels for longer, smaller panels for shorter amounts of time.
• Establishing shots should be largest panel on the page.
• "In-between" shots. Little details that don't give too much away to spread out the pacing of the story.
• Changes in mood, theme, tone or setting require larger panels.
• No borders on panels - eye lingers longer.
• Will Eisner used ABABAB method - border, no border, border, no border. Sets a 'beat'.
• No two pages alike in panelling - more interesting and visually appealing.
• Split up speech bubbles to account for pauses in speech. Takes more time, leads the eye.
• English speakers/readers - top left to bottom right.
• Don't group all speech bubbles at the top of the panels.
• Switch the "camera angles"
• Try different shaped panels? (perosnally I don't like this in comics)
• Gaps between panels make the page less crowded and confused.
• Put speech bubbles in the path of the eye.

"Tailypo" Initial Storyboard

My initial sketchy storyboards for Tailypo. In all, including the front and back covers and end pages it would be 20 pages. If I can cut this down to 16 (or less!) it would significantly improve my workload.

As it is..:

Page one: Shows the cabin in the woods. I like the idea of having a full page image here, in order to set the scene. Could get a lot of detail into it, too.

Pages two and three: Man and dogs, hungry, prepare to go out. In the woods, kills rabbit, cooks on fire, shares with dogs.

Pages four and five: Continue hunting, hear strange noises, curious, dogs growling, man gets nervous.

Pages six and seven: A double page spread of the creature. Another opportunity to put in a lot of detail, and end up with a beautiful image (hopefully).

Page eight: Man shoots, creature runs, leaves behind tail. Man returns to cabin.

Page nine: The tail cooking. Again, I think this would look great as a full page.

Pages ten and eleven: Night-time. The voice. Man sends out dogs, 2 return. I like the idea of having the speech bubbles for the voice come out of the panels.

Pages twelve and thirteen: Creature returns, dogs - twice more.

Pages fourteen and fifteen: Wait for dawn. Creature returns and attacks.

Page sixteen: The comic ends how it began - a full page scene in the woods, only this time only the chimney remains.

Plus 2 pages for end papers, and 2 pages for front and back cover. Last end page should have speech bubble on it.