Our graphic novel is about a bi-racial family. But this family is based on the way my own family looks, which really isn't bi-racial, it's more multi-racial. My mother was born in the Philippines. My father is African American. So my sister and I could be considered biracial kids. But in my own family, my husband is Jewish with Russian descendants. Our kids are a mixed bag, for sure. In our story the mother is Black and the father is of Irish descent. Years ago I had seen a national geographic cover with a face on it that represented the next generation of mankind. The girl on the cover was olive skinned, with light colored wavy hair, facial features showing her African roots, but with light colored eyes. I thought it would be great if one of our characters looked like that. Once the sketches were done I did some color comps to play around with the outfits, keeping in mind that their outfits need to work with the colors I plan on using for the backgrounds. Keith wanted to try pastel color schemes but I wanted to keep it neutral. So, here they are. The family that I'll be living with for the next few months of my life while I develop this graphic novel pitch. Hopefully, an editor loves them enough that they become part of their family, too. I will then devote the next 18 months of my life to bringing their story into the world.
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Every good family story needs to have some sort of annoying older brother, and ours has the perfect annoying older brother. Here are my rough exploratory sketches for him. Since I have already figured out my main character, all other character designs need to fit into her universe and have the same relative head to body proportions. So when I designed this, I didn't have a size chart next to me, and I had to tweak the chosen drawing to fit along with my main character. The starred version is the one we chose and the enlarged version is my attempt to resize him to fit proportionally with our main character. Even though I still tweaked him, once I see them side by side, I notice that his head mass is much smaller than his little sisters. Now that it's in Photoshop, I can tweak this up a bit and redraw it until I get him to look like the original sketch but also look like he lives in the same universe as our girl. Here I'm really liking the shapes I've got and I think he fits in nicely with his lil sis. I used oval construction lines to build his afro so I can redraw it easier next time on the panels. And here we have our final big brother! Approved by the author and happily accepted by the illustrator. Next up are Mom & Pops. Til next time.
Excited to begin the art for my graphic novel, I dove into some character sketches for my main protagonist, a biracial 12 year old girl. Once I had sketched a few, I showed my husband and co-creator, Keith Marantz, to get some feedback. This part has always been very hard for me. I'm not going to lie. I have found that I can take criticism on my art pretty well, from pretty much anyone, but when it came to getting it from my husband... well, I needed to work on not tearing his head off. So, when he gave me feedback on these characters, I handled it better than I have in the past (he still has his head attached to his body) but there is still room for me to grow in this collaborative process. His thoughts were along the lines of "be more edgy" which we then had to decipher the exact meaning of what "edgy" looks like. We went through some other graphic novels and researched the look of characters and discussed it further. "Like this style?" I'd ask. "No, that's horrible," he'd say. Okaaay. "How about like this?" I'd ask. "No, not quite like that." Back and forth it went until I pulled out an old sketch that I'd done and asked, "Like this?" BINGO! Yup! That's the visual that Keith needed to describe what his idea of "edgy" is. Now that I had something to visualize, I was able to make some changes to our main character. She went from the first drawing to the second drawing. Basically, smaller eyes, a little more angle to the face and a little more corners incorporated into the design. I'm pretty happy with her, and Keith likes her too. Actually, I love her. So, when I feel an emotional reaction to a drawing, I think it's a good sign. And with both of us now happy with our main protagonist, I started doing environment thumbnail sketches. I basically drew this out during my Digital Painting college class and explained the process of placing my horizon line in varying places and then plotting the character in the space first. By focusing on shapes first, I can think purely in design rather than get caught up with the details. I only really fleshed out the top row and would have done all of them but for the interest of not boring my students, I went ahead with the top image. I enlarged the thumbnail and then made sure it fit the ratio of a full page spread by adding space at the top and bottom of the image. Then I constructed the sketch a bit more to get some forms in and cleaned up the sketch a little, still trying to keep it rough. Lastly, I did a quick tonal value study over the comp. The one on the left I did very quickly in class and the one on the right I spent a bit more time with, using the lasso tool in PS to make some nice pointy hard shapes for the rocky mountains in the back and making sure I locked my layers on each element to keep the value gradation within my forms.
Well, that's all for now. Next up will be designing the secondary characters in the story along with fully developing the above illustration. Til next time!
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art is hard...Living a creative life, managing multiple projects, meeting deadlines, finding your muse asleep when you need it to be working with you, fighting the Dreaded Pirate Procrastination Monster... and remaining joyous throughout the process. That's what this will be about: reflections of my life, joys and struggles as an artist. Archives
April 2021
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