Monday, June 04, 2007

Being An Account Most Unprecedented in Nature

I doubt I can even begin to describe how much fun this project was. Believe it or not, the original assignment was to pencil and ink 4 pages from a "Ghost Rider" Marvel-style comic plot--as you can see, I took it upon myself to take certain, er, liberties with that basic idea. I finally got around to digitally coloring the pages this quarter, and, for the most part, I am well pleased with the results. It would have been nice to have some more time to spend touching things up, but after a while the cost : benefit ratio on stuff like that just starts to skyrocket and one just has to decide when enough is enough.

My only big concern with the coloring is that page two isn't well-enough unified with one and three. The bump up on saturation in the fourth one is intentional and (i think) turned out the way I wanted it to; my main concern is that the saturation in the second one competes with it and might lessen its overall impact. I wanted to use color to make the difference in environment real obvious between the last panel and the previous ones, which worked--but I think the page's overall unity was compromised. This is fairly minor, but it taught me that I'm going to need to pay more attention not only to the overall harmony between the panels of each individual page, but also between the pages of each project.

Originally, the characters were far more foul-mouthed than they are in this version--I still think "burn, you bastards" and "get out of the road, rim jobber" are infinitely more amusing, but one of my professors asked if he could submit the black and white linework of this piece for use in the Sequential Art section of SCAD's next catalogue, so I figured it would be wise to tone things down a bit.

Oh, and Dopey McHurtsalot in the top right quarter of page 4 is undoubtably the best thing I've ever drawn in my life.

1 comment:

Josh Mauser said...

Aha! Finally and much too late I've stumbled upon your blog.

Top notch, Isaac, seriously. I remember seeing these pages but I don't think I've seen them in color until now. They turned out fantastically (I'm really digging page 1 and 3). You also seem to have quite a gift in waxing old timey slang.

Hopefully I can join the District ranks next year, as soon as a worthwhile concept chugs my way.

Looking forward to the summer and more updates.