As part of my continued work following the lessons in Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, I was tasked with creating two thumbnailed comic pages based on the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill:
- Jack and Jill went up the hill
- To fetch a pail of water.
- Jack fell down and broke his crown,
- And Jill came tumbling after.
I started off with just thumbnails as instructed, but wound up creating two completed pages because I’m crazy/deranged! Since we had a bit of freedom in how our comic would unfold, I opted for something more along the lines of:
- Jack and Jill went up the hill
- To fetch a pail of DEATH!!!
With that in mind, here are my two comic pages:
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So yup, that's my take on Jack and Jill. Kind of has the old Looney Toons vibe in the second to last panel:
The bizzare Batman panel at the end is there because the assignment was to try and work in all the various types of panel transitions as defined in the book. Here are my notes on them, which are simplified, but I found them helpful when thumbnailing:
- Moment to moment - slow motion between two panels
- Action to action - beginning and end of an action, not all steps
- Subject to subject - one scene moves between characters or objects, furthers narrative
- Aspect to aspect - one scene moves between characters or objects but does not further narrative, adds depth
- Scene to scene - scene change, new place or time
- Symbolic - nonliteral, character state of mind or visual metaphor
- Non sequitur - defies closure, doesn’t fit into the story
I'll leave it to you to try and find each example in my Jack and Jill story, some are a bit of a stretch but I’m not getting graded on this so funk it!
As far as the nuts of bolts of creating this, I did my initial sketches on paper with ink. It’s pretty hard to tell what’s going on with these sketches, they’re more of a brainstorming phase I guess? The one below is two different concepts, two pages on the top and two pages on the bottom. I think my idea was to have Jack have an actual crown and have him slip on a banana peel or some shit.
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Once I determined those concepts sucked ass, I kept thumbnailing. This one is actually really close to finished layout, just crazy rough and hard to make out what's going on. This is where I decided there had to be a monster attack, because monster attacks make everything better.
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After the thumbnails were done I went into Manga Studio and started sketching better rough pencils. Below are the rough pencils, tightened pencils, and inks. I used a two page template from Doug Hills just to make it easier - though really these pages aren't intended as a two page spread.
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Finally, I exported from Manga Studio and did my coloring in Photoshop just for the hell of it - I actually want to try and do some coloring with the watercolor brushes in Manga Studio but I'll save that for another assignment. Here is the colored version with the page template still visible in Photoshop.
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And that's it! A seemingly overwhelming amount of information for a two page comic you can read through in a few seconds. All in all, this assignment was really good practice and a great window for me into what it takes to make a complete comic page. I'm going to keep working through the Drawing Words and Writing Pictures assignments with my ultimate goal of creating a Farmer Bob comic in the not too distant future!