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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Pencils and one great sweater

A couple of pencils from the ten-page story I'm doing for the Crogan's Vengeance / Salt Water Taffy Free Comic Book Day comic.


 This first page was an attempt to try and go back to the style of pencilling I did with Crogan's Vengeance - small fixed-weight pen drawings with spotted blacks. I actually did this about a third smaller than I did with Vengeance, drawing it at about 4" tall. After doing the second page, and realizing that my gutters were actually twice as wide (working this small it was hard to guage) and that I couldn't accurately estimate how big my letters were going to be when I tightened them up, I decided to go back to the NEW way. Here's the third page:

 This is the method I used on Crogan's March - a 4" x 6" template in which I used blue pencil. This has a downside - it's hard for me to clearly envision my black-and-white ratio, but the benefits outweigh that. My hope is that I've had enough practice over-analyzing the black/white composition thing and that now a kind of developed instinct will carry me through. In the final version of this page, the bottom panel has actually grown a little taller to include the top of the pulley-thing, and the row above has gotten shorter - it was only as tall as it was in order to fit in young David Crogan's dialogue in that right-hand panel, and in measuring it out I found that it required less space than I originally thought. In other news, I found my old J. Peterman "Nantucket Sweater" that I stole from my dad when I first went off to college. He had worn it for years and years before THAT, and for the past couple it had somehow ended up in a storage box. I found it when we were unpacking, and I've worn it pretty much every day since. It's ridiculously comfortable. Peterman clothes last decades; there's not a hole or fray in sight, and I am REALLY hard on clothing. The fact that it survived my undergrad living and a Europe trek is a testament to its stability. So if you're looking for the world's greatest sweater, this one gets my vote, and it pops up in their catalog every few years, so keep your eyes peeled.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Will baby Jonathon be making an appearance?

Chris Schweizer said...

No, not in this one. I was actually finished with the story before thinking about it! There is an age difference between the two, and this story is taking place roughly around 1715, 1716. So he could be around, although it's probably unlikely his mother would allow him to go to sea as a toddler.