Senior Project Blog Post Update #1
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
