I got the thumbs up on my layouts on Wednesday. I’m supposed to move on to the next stage (“construction”), to be followed by pencils and then, finally, inks. To be honest, I’m not quite sure I know what the difference between “construction” and “pencils” really is.
Here are my layouts; I warn you that they’re really sketchy:
Each page of these layouts started out as half of an 8.5×11 inch piece of US Letter-sized paper. These layouts aren’t terribly tight — I was more focused on trying to fit all the stuff I needed to on the various pages. I scanned my first layouts, but then I also wanted to revise some panels, so I replaced a few with new versions. Once I liked the overall look, I printed them out larger, and then went through an exercise of “spotting my blacks” with a sharpie to give a sense of the tonal composition of the final pages. The versions you see here are the en-sharpied pages.
It’s still all in early stages, so it’s not much to write home about. And yet, I feel like some of these pages have elements that feel like a new types of accomplishment. For example, the sword panel on the final page. There are a lot of interesting angles in that panel (mostly because I was trying to minimize dead space), and I had no photo reference for anything like that arrangement. I don’t think I’ve ever drawn as lively a panel as that one. Sure, it’s nowhere near final, but I already feel good about where it’s headed.
