POW! - DEEP: Undersea Utopia

[Ilaekae]

The hentai version of Ragnarok has already popped into my head...

[LORD M]

The hentai version of Ragnarok has already popped into my head...

wat

[Ilaekae]

It's a manga joke. The hentai version of a Japanese story called Ragnarok has 90% of the population female, 10% male, as well as humanoid droids, so the humans walk around with their (typically huge and perky) boobs exposed to prove they're real humans.

[MeTaL-Mike]

It's a manga joke. The hentai version of a Japanese story called Ragnarok has 90% of the population female, 10% male, as well as humanoid droids, so the humans walk around with their (typically huge and perky) boobs exposed to prove they're real humans.

Boobs?? cool!!!

I've been doing some panels about how the utopia has come to be. but am still playing with some idea's. will upload what i have soon, keep forgetting to scan it.

Fuck man, i really can't forgive myself for not knowing about the POW, how could i have missed it????

[Izi]

I'm working on mine, gotta do the script though before it gets complicated and I have to ad lib

I was working on colors for some of the enviro's and characters, now i think I have a good idea of where I want the panels to go and how to portray the world.

[S.C. Watson]

I would tell you my plans.

But then, I'd have to kill you.

[MeTaL-Mike]

should we like post our progress?
or just do it when we're finished?

[Ilaekae]

Whatever floats your boat. WIPs are nice and sometimes help get others off their lazy butts...

Just post in this thread. I'll move them myself when we get into the final stages.

[Izi]

I'm still struggling through my story actually, it's like I come up with a great idea in the shower and then I forget it, plus there's technical aspects of ancient Mesopotamian history I've been getting hung up on over at Enenuru...

I bought some comic books to refresh my memory though I had forgotten how yucky the muscles on the guys looked D:

[Izi]

First shot, I had a 7 hour wait at the mechanic so I finished a full body CHOW sketch and some of this. How tempted am I to put a spider gag in her mouth?

Waaaay more to come

[MeTaL-Mike]

Cool!

here's what i've got so far. I think i'll end up with much more pages than i thought. have to hurry with this.

[Izi]

good idea using the arrows like that. i like the clouds and the planet cuts. Are you going to color and ink? I want to so bad, but I might have to make some cuts to the other activities and just stop the design process so i can polish up what I've got.

Oh this activity makes me giggle. I should do this more instead of that time gobbling Sims 2 game, I can make my own damned stories by hand and practice my #%#@%ing drawing

[Rist]

I might join this although it migt be tough (I never do this kind of thing).

[MeTaL-Mike]

well since details are not a must on this one i'm going to concentrate on the story first and see what time i'll have left. i do want to polish this bit more. this is super drafty

color is my curse so don't know about that

[Izi]

maybe just some nice blue transparent glazes or something like they did on the Star Wars painted comics, nothing fancy. I love color so I plan on workin' it...this POW thing is a blast, It's kid of cool, doing the stuff I did back in highschool with actual drawing skills..

My question is do they ink first or color first? I was thinking color first...layers in photoshop must have changed a lot for the comic industry, however...

Well I hope I can get this done, it's a big challenge, but also the most oppurtunity to lay out the story for sure...

[Rist]

1. pencil sketch
2. clean up with strong lines (i.e. inking)
3. place that layer onto a multiply blend mode and then make a new layer undernieth.
4. Paint your colours on the layer undernieth.
5. making a mask on the inked layer and then masking out areas makes it look like the inked areas are broken up and have various line widths.

N00b tip: change opacity so you can see under that think line work and make your colours clean.

[Sir Bret]

I've never really looked at POW before, just COW and ChOW; and EOW, for this one. I'm probably going to enter this one - I have a Daler and Rowney sketchbook all ready for it.

After exams are over, of course... just two more weeks... and I can artify!
I'll probably link one of the ideas to my EOW, just so I can flesh it out some more.

[DoomMatter]

what monsieur madden seems to forget is that this is a) this is conceptual art and you really don't have to think QUITE that hard on it. and b) a 'percieved' utopia is a very common place for stories to start but they rarely stay that way, because conflict is necessary for story. we can all hope for a utopia where mankind has learned their lessons about war and bickering. i think one with an uninhabbitable surface (as a result of war) lends a VERY compelling reason for both under water habbitation and an understanding of why fights can't happen. people don't NEED to be TOLD not to fight because they're all stuck underwater from fighting in the first place?

[Izi]

A couple of observations: I tend to get frozen in between the narrative and the dialogue. I know most comics are not written, pencilled, inked and colored by the same person, but some are. How does one manage the dialogue. .Does it help to picture it like a movie going on in your head? Or is it best to treat each frame like a composition in itself? How does one decide on where to place frames or decide when to throw in a big splashy beauty shot that covers a whole page?

These things I want to know...I'm watching how they're doing it in Spawn:Godslayer and some of the Marvel releases this month and it seems like with Spawn there's more artistic leeway whereas with Marvel it's very cut and dry, and structured...

There also seems to be an abstract use of color montages where a whole page is like geared more towards art than the story itself...

thought, thoughts, yes please?

[Ilaekae]

You're pretty much on the right track by "viewing" it in your mind like a movie, with the dialogue and narration (if any). Just play it over and over, refining it as you go. When you have a handle on it, scribble out the copy and take a look at it in the context of the images you were coming up with. Who's saying this...or this? Are they interacting? If so, they belong in one panel. Is the main character mentally "talking" to himself about a sequence of events? If so, the visual panels should be done to make his thought process obvious.

Once you get this far, you'll discover you may not need all the images or text you thought you did, because one or the other alone makes the point in the sequence.

Example: Giant crab walks by. Thought: "Damn! I hate crabs!" These obviously belong together. Note that we probably wouldn't KNOW he hates crabs/cops/his boss/taxis otherwise...

Mermaid "strolls" by. The look on guy's face says it all, so you don't have to have him thinking, "Whoa! Great tits!"

Extremely complex set ups that require explanation probably work best as just a lot of copy broken up into three or four smaller pieces per page to make it less boring to read, while the art underneath shows overviews, sets up a scene to come, or gives the reader a sense of atmosphere. Just try not to DUPLICATE copy with art. It's boring and a waste of paper. They both should work together to create a bigger, more informative whole.

Any of that help?


ADD: Keep in mind that on this particular challenge, you don't necessarily have to work speech balloons into your art. We're dealing with an idea in rough form, so you can have a string of panels with the text above and below with a line just pointing to the character if it's specifically speech. You can even insert notes like "Looks pissed off..." or something like that.

[arttorney]

Sequence 1




Sequence 2 has a little tentacle action. I hope nobody gets too turned on.



Here is sequence 3 because I got bored at work.





Sequence 4:




Sequence 5:






Sequence 6:



Sequence 7:



Sequence 8:




Sequence 9:



Sequence 10:

[mickeymao]

I was thinking about a new episode in Gulliver's Travels, where Gulliver's ship goes down and he ends up in an undersea utopia that somehow parodies or makes commentary on our screwed-up society. I probably won't have time to really get into it, since I'm in the middle of laying out a 240-page book, but I can at least think about it. So, what to satire? Perhaps something about our waste disposal habits, or our penchant for lying. I keep thinking that one way a utopia could be possible is if everyone could read everyone else's thoughts, so maybe the inhabitants are telepathic mer-people of some sort.

[mickeymao]

Folks who are doing a lot of wordless stuff -- it can be confusing, especially at this rough stage. To help us decode what you're trying to show us, and thereby help us give better feedback, some description or notes (such as Ilaekae mentions, and Arttorney used) would be very helpful. It may even be helpful to outline your whole page/story with notes describing each shot before you draw, so as not to trap yourself in an awkward drawing or page layout before you've even established where you're going.

[Izi]

I need a good place to get comic fonts - nothing cheesy, I mean stuff like you would see in a Spawn comic or something, anyone got any useful links?

edit:

oops nevermind found a link:

http://hans.presto.tripod.com/links004.html

hehe oh, I see, I'm going to be hand-lettering, how quaint!

[arttorney]

If you grow tired of that, there are plastic lettering guides (like stencils) you can buy down at the art store. They get the job done pretty quick.

[flashrabbit]

Here is what i got so far. It makes no sense now when its unfinished (if it gets finished ;/ )
but its going to follow the characters as the story unfolds.
A day in utopia , jumping between scenes until an big event brings their collected attention.

[mickeymao]

Nice work, flashrabbit!

Ok, here's a beginning of my Gulliver idea, to show where it's going. It would be about 12 pages long, which I may not have time to lay out

This is how I do most of my book layouts now, drawing directly in InDesign. It isn't the most facile drawing program, but it gives maximum flexibility for making changes.

>> EDIT: New, slightly darker direction for Gulliver. I like how Swift reverses the social order in the Houynyhyms story, and I want to do something similar here. The Atlanteans, though their society is perfect and lovely for them, are not at all sympathetic toward other creatures. They 'fish' for humans and other land-dwelling creatures, and imprison them in a giant air-filled terrarium for their own amusement and edification.

Social commentary will occur in the fish-men’s responses to Gulliver’s objections, pointing out that he has no moral high ground to stand on because humans keep intelligent animals in captivity all the time (plus lie, cheat, steal, kill each other, ruin the environment and so on -- none of which the Atlanteans do).

Adventure (which was missing from my other idea) come in the form of Gulliver trying to escape a seemingly impossible prison.










My DEEP designs:
POW
CHOW
IDW
EOW

[mickeymao]

I'm making a separate post for my Sci-fi story. Here's a taste.

[Izi]

I'm just you know, playing around with the lettering, I think I'm going to weed out what I like and use it consistently - right now I think a drop shadow effect might work better. I do like the handwritten letters more than the typed ones, and I tried both. this seems to work.

I have 4 more panels in this story finished but not colored and two more stories in the works...stay tuned. im being a perv. right now.

[Izi]

lettering is pissing me off

how do you learn lettering?