For my first day away during the Sketch a Day experiment, I thought I would share a bit of my process on a current job. This is page 5 of a new Flare story I am working on for Heroic Publishing. On this page I’ve tightly laid out the first 2 panels, as well as the “overlapping” element of Flare herself. I’ve chosen this layout for a couple reasons. 1: it looks cool, and that counts. And 2: her body language in the overlapping image echos her words/feelings in the top 3 panels, so I could have just drawn 3 “talking heads” panels, or done this to shake things up plus add a bit of tension.
In the third panel you’ll see that I’ve very roughly laid in a change in camera angle. Normally we see everything from our own eye-level perspective, so I try to play to that in my layouts to make things seems more realistic. But in this case, I’ve used the layout of the panel to draw the reader’s eye towards the lower two panels and away from the large figure, with both the placement of the word balloons and by making the floor of the 3rd panel basically a triangle. I will color this with the same tone as the wall behind the figures in panel 4, even if it does not wind up the same color. So as you can see, even in this early stage, I’ve got to be thinking about what will be the last step in the process, adding color, and how it can add to the overall effect and influence the design of the page.
This is also just a rough, so I reserve the right to change my mind about any and all of this!
I will post the completed rough for this page when, well, it’s completed! Just got the script the other day and 1-4 are as rough as the bottom 3 panels are here, but this page seemed most interesting so far to use for this example, so I did it up.
Hope you guys enjoy this li’l walk-through! If so, please let me know in the comments section below!
Rob
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