Project Blackfire

February 28th,

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been hard at work cranking through these pages and there hasn’t been much to say. There hasn’t been much to do either except to crank away at my drawings, but now that it’s been a few weeks, I thought I should go ahead and update you all on my progress and thoughts.

These past several weeks, I have gotten through the drawing of about 31 pages. I have been drawing a couple of pages every day and hope to be finished with all 45 by the end of next week. Because I have noticed that inking is a lot lower stress and energy for me, I have been mostly focused on pencilling (sic) pages and use my down time to ink. As such, I don’t have as many of my pages inked, but I plan on catching up with inking on the last day or two I have before moving onto the coloring process.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that I had gotten a bit off schedule and behind with my work due to a variety of factors; I had taken a few too many shifts at my job, my sleep schedule was thrown off, etc, etc. I was still working on my drawings every day, but I didn’t feel like I was as productive as I had been at the beginning of the semester and it seemed to take me a lot longer to do the same amount of work. Either way I noticed that I was not as much in the zone, if you will, with my drawing and more prone to distraction, and it was interesting trying to find that energy and come up with a solution to get back into a good work pattern.

This past week I am glad to say, I have gotten back in that zone and  I have found myself working for 4-5 hours straight, getting my daily 2 pages done as well as inking several pages and still having time to do other work. It’s such a nice feeling when you really hit that groove and can find yourself working long hours on your artwork and time flies because you’re really enjoying it. The quality of the artwork is also greatly improved when you hit those strides. That’s how this past week has been and it’s refreshing after the week before that felt like a drag.

This week I’ve found that my ability to portray accurate and lively facial expressions has improved greatly. I also feel like my linework is cleaner and there’s more depth and dimensionality in my figures and forms. I have also made an effort to improve my drawing of backgrounds, buildings, and props (all of which I am weaker at, as compared with my figure and character drawing) It’s always a really good thing as an artist to find what you’re weakest at and work extra hard to improve on those aspects.

Since a lot of the recent pages have been more dialogue heavy and have had more significant moments in relation to character development, I have also paid close attention to final tweaks of dialogue and the like and have been fine tuning them up to the last minute.

–Lord Arik

January 31st,

For my Senior Project this semester, we’re required to take down notes on the progress we make on our projects in blog posts and talk about our creative process, planning, and thoughts.

For these first few weeks, I have mostly been intent on completing the storyboard and drafting stage of my comic. My process for each chapter actually starts in the writing phase where I work out in a sort of bullet point fashion the order of events that occurs in that chapter. Over time, I change things, shape the story, flesh it out with character development, remove unnecessary bits, change scenes, reorder events, and then otherwise polish out the story.

From there, I start working out basic storyboards, figuring out framing, image and word choice, pacing, and page layouts. A lot of different things go into this part of the process and, very often, I’ll end up with several different incarnations of the way the pages will look. That’s just on the first run through. Dialogue is the most subject to continual change, even up until I start work on the final artwork. This happens for a variety of reasons.

So far, I am about 31 pages into my storyboarding/drafting phase out of a predicted 45-50 total pages.  Knowing how I usually work, those pages are still very subject to change. I plan finish with this drafting phase by Friday, February 5th so I can start work on Cover art and the 40+ pages I have to complete.

Another thing I have done a lot of these past few weeks is polishing up and finalizing various elements of character design. Considering that these are already complete designs, these sketches mostly focus on figuring out minor tweaks that will help address certain issues I have found while storyboarding as well as making sure that their designs stay as consistent as possible in the final comic. These sketches can also have the purpose of figuring out the nature of expressions, mannerisms, presence, and other personality/emotional aspects of the characters.

The last thing I should mention is that I have sketched out several designs for the layout of my Chapter 1, Issue 1 cover. This includes the composition of the artwork itself as well as the placement of the Malefactor Comics logo and title. I also came up with several working titles for the issue and figured out potential designs for the title that would complement the rest of the cover art well.

I’ll be doing another update in a week.

-Lord Arik

Silent Blade Sketches: Working out her body type, gear, armor, proportions

Dark Flame: working out his body type, gear, human face, proportions