Stolen Lines Comic
'you'd better not let me down Charles Grey.'
Reading this quote makes me think about a person who experienced great disappointment in the past and currently got trust issues. I want to create a story that shows the struggle of today's teens facing these kinds of problems.
My idea was to create a story where a teenage girl named Eliza runs away from home after losing a mother and being abandoned by her best friend. She goes to the party in the woods where she is attacked by wolves and saved by her missing friend. I started with writing a long story, which I turned into a shorter script that would be easy to follow and illustrate.
To plan out each page, I used thumbnails that gave me a rough idea of what should be happening on each of them. Although my sketches were very messy, I managed to edit them in photoshop and use them as a guide to draw each panel.
Script
<Eliza woke up from a nightmare screams for her mother.>
-Mom!
<She looked at her phone, it was around 11 pm. She got a new message from her friend Kayle.>
-Party in the woods, meet me there at 11. Don't be late ;)
<Eliza dressed up and sneaked out of the house by the window. She heads towards the light in the woods and meets her friend there>
<Kayle gives a bottle of beer to Eliza and cares for the wellbeing of her friend>
-How are you feeling?
<Eliza with tears in her eyes, tells her friend about her current situation can't get any worse.>
-I lost a mother and I got abanded by my best friend. It can't get worse.
<Kayle got distracted by a growling noise coming out from the bushes.>
-Did you hear that?
<Eliza stares in the darkness and spots a pair of red glowing eyes.>
-Wolves!
<As girls trying to back out, one of the wolves attacks Eliza with its claws.
-Somebody help me!
<A dark figure appears out of the darkness and grabs the wolf by its neck. In a light glow of a campfire, Eliza recognizes this person.>
-Charles!?
<Charles turns around to talk to Eliza and then she slaps him in the face.>
-How could you leave me when I needed you the most!?
<Feeling the quilt, Charles apologizes and makes a promise.
-I'm sorry. I will always be here for you, I promise.
<Once disappointed Eliza wants to make sure Charles will keep his promise.
-You's better not let me down Charles Grey.
Character design
I created two mood boards for the character design inspired by today's fashion. I used a Pinterest board to gather some pictures and then put them into one A4 sheet in photoshop. I subtracted colours from the pictures to create a colour palette for the characters.
The protagonist named Eliza is 17 years old teen that wears a buffy red jacket that makes her look cute. Although I didn't make a mood board for her friend Kayle, I decided to give her a blue bodycon dress to make her look like the cool type of friend. She will appear only in one panel so, I used my spare time to work on the main characters. The last character is named Charles Grey after the person from the quote I was given. He is the same age as Eliza and they are best friends that had a little fell out. Charles is the type of person that wears a lot of dark colours, he also got horns. However, he is not as evil as it may look like.
I found pictures with cool and warm shades, which I wanted to use in colouring backgrounds in my comic. I picked Cool blue colour to create a dark room mood and a stary night. To create the glow of a campfire, I used warm colours combined with black. I used a gradient tool in photoshop to make some of these effects.
Final product
I used the knowledge from digital inking and colouring lessons. The whole process was no faster than doing traditional artwork. After inking, colouring and shading the first page, I decided to make flat colours on the rest of the pages as I didn't have enough time to shade them all. I also tried to apply the golden ratio to my panels. However, after the first two panels, I lost it and started leaving a lot of space around the panels caused by time restrain. I think it's only a matter of practice before I learn to easily use the golden ratio, as well as inking and colouring digitally. I will keep practising these skills as seeing how many new things I leant motivates me to work hard on my goals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I am happy that I managed to fully shade at least one of the pages, considering how slow the whole process was. I also finally went out of my comfort zone and stopped keeping the speech bubbles strictly in a panel. I think the pages look interesting this way, but I still need to practice using speech bubbles. I want to learn more types of speech bubbles and how to best place them across the page.
Anatomy is something that I still need to practice, as you can see some inconsistency in the faces and bodies of characters.