How is that Supposed to Work, Exactly?

Well, yes, I’ve been a bit busy and so posting has been slow over the last week. But I am still alive, and here I am with a sample of one of the several things I was doing. It is some work on the graphic book project. (You’ll be happy that I am sparing you details of tedious committees, faculty meetings, confusing snippets of physics, incomplete musings and computations, etc…)

As mentioned recently, I’ve been doing thumbnails and rough page layouts on one of the stories, and that has been useful for editing and rewriting. I went further and improved an earlier story that I’d written that had mostly been drawn already, and so that encouraged me to do slightly tighter page layouts so as to fit them more closely to the story as it was already drawn, for a smoother final read. I’ll need to find some time to do those pages in full rendering soon.

But then while gathering together some old rough sketches for yet another story, and marrying them to the script that I’d written, I decided to do one of these tighter (but still rough) versions of one of the pages, just for fun, since I did not have any pages of that story drawn. In particular there is a new character in that story I am particularly keen to bring to life since she has languished in sketch form on the page for almost two years, and I wanted to work on her design a bit more. So I started doing the rough sketches, and then I got carried away and did all the text layout as well, and then, and then, and then…. I ended up doing far more work on this rough page than any rough page deserves, even going as far as to throw some (digital) paint on one of the frames.

Rather than show you a snippet or frame, I thought I’d show you a whole (rough) page for a change… And the sketch breakdown that it was based on too. (I’ve removed most of the conversation, but it should be clear that the central topic of this part of the discussion is a “Theory of Everything”.) This is all encouraging me to consider doing the whole of this story in this simpler style as a nice contrast the other stories I’ve done so far…

-cvj