Companions in Solitude

I've been absent on this blog for at least the past month. Partly because I've been busy and partly because I don't want to put out anything about this project on the internet. But then I remembered that literally no one reads this, so who cares?

Yeah, so I wrote about this way back in October but now it's finally at the stage where I'm officially In Production. I finished the script about a month ago and, after feedback from my writer friends, redrafted it several times but now it's basically in working condition. It's forty-six pages and was a massive, wonderful bitch to write. Here's a spoiler free preview:

Right now I've thumbnailed the first act and I'm drafting up the prologue for the project deadline. The official launch is August 23rd and it will be updating biweekly for a period of just over two years, at which point I'll promptly drop dead. Here's a rundown of my digital work so far:

Character Evolution

Let's start off super crappy. This is a quick sketch I did of the central characters back in around October. Aside from Underwood looking like a malformed halfling and Angelica hovering in the foreground without feet, the design is just exceptionally boring. It's a bad sketch of two dull looking individuals looking pensive.

I began to draw from observation. Top right is the somnambulist  from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,which was a huge visual influence. Middle left is actress Sarah Chalke who helped inspire the design of Angelica (or at least her hair). Below is Angelica from reference

It's at this point I got a friend to model for Angelica and started to give more thought to her costume. I came up with the idea of exaggerating her coat collar so that it appears almost as a pair of angelic wings referencing her namesake. When she transforms, it changes to look like horns. Just little character specific details to make it more authentic.

I started to play around with anatomy, making things more exaggerated and giving more of a sense of urgency to the lines. It doesn't look like a real person, but it has a basis in observation rather than those weird, stumpy monstrosities I was drawing before.

Here's Angelica in roughly the same shape as she'll look in the actual story. I played around with colour palettes (it'll probably be more muted than this) gave her boots and got rid of the bangs because they felt too contemporary. Instead I gave her haircut to fit with the raised collar. Notice how it changes the her head shape - the more unique the silhouette of a character, the more memorable. Otherwise you limit yourself to purely cosmetic details which don't have as much impact.

This is an early sketch of Underwood (really early - Angelica is the smoker in the final draft). The anatomy is different but still all kinds of fucked up. Still, it's an attempt at caricature, so I'm on the right track.

Here's one from the same era  but with better anatomy. I extended the coattails, which gives the character more definition. I decided I wanted them to act like the tail of a cat; raised when frightened, curling when on edge, etc. It's a nice way of establishing emotion in a character.

 These are some character sketches for Underwood. One notable change from the current version is the eye shape; they started circular but that didn't seem expressive enough. I later gave Angelica the same white eyes he has. It was initially just to establish that he was missing his soul, but I realised it works just as well for a dead-eyed corpse. Plus it gives the two characters a unique feature to share, which shows their bond on a visual level.

I did some more observational drawing. This is John Cusack (right) and Conor Oberst (left). I based Underwood's look on Oberst, Holden Caulfield and Bud Cort in Harold and Maude. Side-partings with the fringe falling over one eye are very important to me.

I looked at more Victorian-inspired haircuts, given the story's influence from Gothic Horror. None of them seemed to fit, but they could work on another character.

Here's Underwood's final design. I gave his hair more volume and accented his posture to be more cartoony. For some reason, I decided early on that his hair should be parted on the left. I read that right-handed parts are associated with charisma due to left-handedness having a stigma associated with it. So naturally I wanted to give the impression of him being an outcast. Although, I wrote in the bible that he was right-handed so I'm going to have to go through and change those thumbs.

Typetone Printing

Something I've really wanted to include in one of my projects is the presentation of text in artwork. The more flowery elements of the script work well as prose and would lose the subjectivity of language when adapted, so I tried to find a way of working in the passages I like without using text boxes or speech bubbles.

This is an early experiment I did, using handwriting to construct an image. With different line weights and text sizes, the handwriting appears as a different tone, creating the illusion of a block colour. It's the same principle as halftone printing. I call it typetone printing. Unfortunately, the initial execution didn't live up to the concept. it's messy and confusing and even copy pasting several lines of handwritten text takes an unprecedented amount of time.

Here's another attempt, this time using a typeface to aid legibility and development time. It's super basic, only emulating one tone instead of three, but it has a really nice feel to it and the potential is obvious. This made me consider using black text on grey to colour the silhouette of particular element of a scene, to draw attention to or from it instead of as a form of shading.

Here's an example of typetone being used to conventionally light a sketch. It's pretty memorable. It seems to work pretty well for a simple drawing.

This was my first test with colour and it's kind of successful, but the font needs to be bolder to make the tone difference more apparent. Putting line art around the body of the text to emphasise it's separation from the other colours might be helpful two. There's also the issue of formatting the text so it's easy to read without skipping words whenever the shape changes. But it illustrates how prose can convey elements of a scene that wouldn't work visually. There's something unique about the style wordplay offers; it's so suggestive, yet it can take you by the hand and guide you from moment to moment.

Miscellaneous

These are the highlights of my random images:

Kind-of-sort-of relevant.

Still experimenting with style here.

 This is a poster design I did. There's a demon in the comic, by the way.

Here he is again.

A glimpse at the story's conclusion...

Going for Caligari here.

Character sketches.

Considering scenes.

These are some brush tests in Photoshop. When I got to actually drawing the comic, I went out and bought some digital brush-sets by Kyle Webster and they are absolutely incredible. Really elevated the final pages into something that looks much more natural than what you normally expect from Photoshop.

So that's pretty much it for digital work. When I'm done with the prologue I'll post the WIPs of all the pages. Until then, here's a testament to how far we've come: