deelyboppers

[egypturnash]

While we were waiting for Midsummer Night's Dream to start last night, Nick asked me to draw Absinthe wearing deelyboppers. So I did.

And then tonight, instead of, like, sleeping, I fooled around and did it in AI.



(yes, that's the new icon, too.)

And while I'm posting Absinthe-related fragments, here's a little hint as to how I'm thinking about this thing: my map of the color schemes for issue 1. Doing it this way lets me think about color purely on the basis of mood, theme, and symbolism, then completely dispense with thinking about color when I'm doing the pages... I know I picked up the basic idea from color charts done for a feature film; I think the particular one I really understood the use of such a thing for when I saw them was Titan AE - two possibly decent films jammed together into one highly flawed piece.

Comments

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Is it wrong that I find the color schemes more erotic than the art?

'Course, it would help if I liked breasts - at all.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Not at all! I've been trying to make sure the color will be as appealing and sensuous as everything else.

[otter3.livejournal.com]

Deelyboppers are love. ♥

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

They indicate whimsey!

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

The sketch is very nice, but wow. That color chart makes my head swim in that you've obvoiously put SO much thought into this. It's going to really show in the final product, I'm sure. A 'limited' palette in your hands isn't so limited at all.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

The color chart just kinda happened. I've probably only spent an hour or so on it, total; it evolved from my drawing little pairs of inch-square page thumbnails to see how the overall flow is proceeding and to work out how exactly to allocate the remaining story into page-sized chunks. Since I'd already decided on such a limited per-page palette, it seemed pretty natural to duplicate these notes in the computer and work out the overall color flow.

I just hope I don't wind up missing something elementary in all this intellectualizing I'm doing of the process. I want this comic to be a fun read.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Um, given the conversation we had this morning before I left for work... I don't think we have to worry too much about that. :)

My only concern is still, wow, I can't believe we get through so much in 28 pages. I'm sure it may expand as I start squeezing in dialogue, but think how little happens in two issues of a typical comic!

It might be a virtue that we're moving so fast, because the story's so freaking dense and it'd be easy to get bogged down -- but I think we have to be extra-careful to make sure we fill in the necessarily details and give the readers a good sense of what's going on!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Depends on the comic. A lot can happen in the fifteen pages of a PULSE-POUNDING KIRBY/LEE EPIC FOR OUR TIMES!!!!!. Or in the eight pages of a tale of Lone Sloane at the edge of reality. Or you can spend an entire issue watching Cerebus take a piss before going to bed.

We should maybe grab some comics lying around and do crude little maps like I'm doing for Absinthe, just to see how we compare.

[kamenkyote.livejournal.com]

Just because you're putting a lot of thought and effort into this doesn't mean it won't be fun! Not at all. If the pages I've seen (super secret!) are any indictation, the comic will be fun indeed. It just makes me realize how much more prelim stuff I could be doing, should I ever decide to do another comic, and how much I didn't do with the one I have now. No, dear, you are to be commended, not worried.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Thanks. *grin*

I'm mostly worrying about striking a balance between wanting to have something fun/exciting/sexy on every page, and wanting to make sure every story point is made clear enough to someone else! A recurring theme in my notes is that this whole project is about making a fluffy, fun comic - fun to make, fun to read.

A lot of these preliminaries are just... the thoughts that're too big to have in my head. I can't compose a whole page in my head so I do it on paper. I can't consider the whole color scheme in advance in my head, so I open up AI.

I think the key to preliminary stuff is to do what you have to do. There's still no official 'model sheet' of any of the characters and there may never be (though I keep thinking I need to make a colorvalue key). I've seen you doing style experiments for your next projects, thinking about tonal choices, about how to slick down to exactly the shapes the story needs. If you think a bit of preliminary work I may be leaning on sounds like busy-work for you, then skip it. Hell, you're nearly done with a story the size we're projecting Absinthe will be; I bet you've got a lot of cryptic Fite! notes piled up somewhere - some which you'll replicate for the next projects, some which you won't.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Hmm, come to think of it, I wonder if I shouldn't be doing some of the same kind of replanning with the writing. Like, maybe a list of things the readers will need to know in order to follow the plot, both when they become important and when we foreshadow them, in rough chronological order. Just so we have a checklist of things that really MUST make it into the story somehow...

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've been trying to keep some of this straight in my head; it's why I tried the private wiki experiment, and why I'm trying to keep my notes in only a couple places instead of in every damn sketchbook I've owned since the start of this year.

I wish I still had my loose issues of Cerebus. In a lot of them, Sim's editorial material was essays on his process - on how he went from seeing the whole overall 300-issue plot in a flash of inspiration around the time of doing, I dunno, issue 10 or so, to breaking it down in steps all the way to the final pages. My methods are influenced by what he said in there; his text and subtext have, um, issues but his working methods are pretty useful. He taught me - and a lot of other people, I'm sure - a lot about how to think about making a comic on a higher level than 'draw a panel, repeat until done'.

Basically it's trying to know where things end, on progressively more detailed scales. We know about where we want the whole story to end. We know about where we want each chapter to end. And all these maps I'm doing are about knowing where each page or spread will end. This is part of why a certain percentage of my layouts are being done with the last panel - I know that one needs to be there, I know what happened on the previous page and what needs to happen between; how do I cut it down into two pages with 1-12 panels? How might I do a sequence of panels on a page to create an effect, and then how do I do each of those panels?

(Despite intending to put it out on the web page-by-page, my fundamental nugget of narrative for Absinthe tends to be the two-page spread.)

We've got this story sprawled out in our heads and notebooks, we've got pretty much everything it needs and a lot of stuff it might or might not need. The task ahead of us on this is one of slicing it up into successively smaller chunks, and making sure each and every one of those little morsels of story is inviting and tasty.

also, I figure that once chapter 1 is fully laid out, we can go over it and see how many Story Points we crammed into it, and thus be better equipped to tentatively map out the other chapters. And decide how many glasses it will really take to tell the tale.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

I'll be brutally honest, though: I know you intimately, I know your strengths, and I know your weaknesses. I think the planning work you've been doing has been brilliant, but from observing your work, it seems like one element you often neglect (and sometimes to very good effect) is the AUDIENCE. Let's face it, babe, you're... lizardy. :D And modeling states of mind other than your own does not come naturally to you. I'm afraid that you'll be blind to the differences in the information WE have about the plot and characters versus what the READERS have. I think we're doing fine so far, and running the drafts cold past a few of our comicky friends should do us just fine, but it is something I consider part of "my half" of the comic duties and something we really have to watch out for!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

We are agreed on this.

My biggest fear is that it will be completely fucking incoherent.

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

Incoherence is not such a bad thing as everybody makes it out to be, really...


That said, lovely image. ♥

[kajarainbow.livejournal.com]

...That's the very weakness I have. My one attempt to speed-write a novel turned out apparently impossible for readers to understand what was going on but possessing awesome prose, judging from those readers' comments. It was incoherent, it has bizarre setting elements, and a crucial scene was repeated twice.

I suppose this makes sense given I have the same difficulties as Peggy do in modeling other mind-states.

I suppose I'll give it another go, and run it by other persons.