Posted

Mar 25th 2009

Mood

Tired

Hello all.

I'll be writing about the creative process behind creating a website for a WIP comic. I'd thought I'll let you in on how I worked on things, which I'll hopefully do more often with other projects.

While I'm still awake I'll be writing about how I created a front page to my other website.

Now I already finished issue 1 and started work on issue 2. However I written up notes and ideas over future stories which later led me to the theme of the series.

It was going to be about a photographer who get's thrown in B-movie type situations. Aliens, giant spiders and haunted houses, things people know are cheesy. I wanted it to be a fun comic, nothing too serious. In the end it's still just a comic.

For a frontpage I needed to summarise that theme along with the main character so that new readers can get an understanding right away on what the comic is about.

I do a lot of sketches before I find the picture I'm happy with. After 7 sketches I came up with this:


I'm very old fashioned. I tend to sketch my picture, scan it in and work on it digitally.

From then on I space out the drawings, edit a few things and then outline them like so.


Then later colour them.


Now there is a reason why I separated the pictures. While the main character (in the middle) is done. The 4 surrounding her need some work.

As a photographer you can guess she would take photos as memories of her mis-adventures. So following the theme I worked on backgrounds for each of the pictures and created a photograph type border.


I had a bit of a problem when coming to the navigation graphics of the website. I wasn't sure what to do. Originally I was going to go with this:

As you might agree it looks pretty damn lame and on top of that unreadable when it will come to the background graphic of the website.

I came back to the theme of photographer and designed these buttons:

Which fits in a lot better.

I come back to the 'Photographs' and rearrange them together with the main character. Creating the main page graphic. Then with some quick coding I put everything together. The result is this:


Interesting tibets:
-You may notice Mary covering most of the clown photograph. While it's sad I have to cover parts of my work, it's a blessing in disguise. I had a hard time with that clown in particular and as you can see it turned out pretty badly. I'm glad it's not the final design when I come to working on that story.
-I'm not going to write 1000 words on the website background. IT'S A DOT!
-One of the original sketches featured a B-movie type poster of the main character being attacked by all these monsters. However I'd thought I save it as a cover for future issues.
-Another sketch was the main character popping out of one of the photos but I thought it was too silly.

I'd like to know what you think about this and if you want me to continue making these kinds of journals.

Thanks!