(copy pasted from my
Art LJ)
Okay, I officially finished volume 1 of FG as of last night. 108 pages of story. It's a weirdly even number and it's more pages than I thought I'd ever get through. Took forever. I ordered a proof copy of what the collected edition will be and now that I have scoped out and corrected every single error, I realized I have to do this over again for however many volumes long I plan on making this story. Part of me wants to die @__@;;;.
One thing I can say is I learned a LOT. I'm REALLY excited to start coloring chapter 6 vol. 2. I feel much more confident as a comic artist. That's a while off though. This is sort of a quick recap of a few things I noticed and learned how to do. I should mention; it took forever to figure out how to do this stuff only for the sake of streamlining and cutting down my comic page work flow. Go figure.
(Panels from FG #5: It's very Apple-Boy centric)
Sometimes I finish a page, close it, open it days later and go "@___@;;;?" I know I used Overlay and Gaussian blur a lot XD;;. Guh, most of these pages I did under a time crunch and I was trying to CHEAT effects... I really like a lot of the effects but damn... Shoulda taken notes... I hope I can do them again. There's a lot of glowing magical things in FG. I don't want the magic to be so overdone it's annoying. I remember hearing people complaining about how in the Harry Potter movies, it was obnoxious to see people use magic to do something as simple as move a chair. Personally, I thought that stuff was pretty cool. It added lots of touches of magic, literally, to the otherwise mundane yet beautiful backdrop of of London. I mean, for the Wizardering world, magic <i>is</i> as easy as breathing (or moving a chair).
I want to keep the fact that they use magic sort of subtle in FG. It'd be new and amazing to Vielle and obviously to the reader, but I don't want people walking around chanting incantations in the middle of talking. So no one will be yelling, "FIREBALL" (or FIRE 3,) while walking up the street, Heheheh! It's just weird. In the end I figured I'd just do something cool with the text bubble to show, even though they're saying "YO!", they might be casting a spell at the same time. So text bubbles can taper off and blend with a spell bubble! *feels clever* I spend a lot of time making the word bubbles part of the art so why not do this too? Here's some examples of the Incantation-less spells.
Um... so drawing these was insanely time consuming. I complain about how long it takes to draw the text bubbles in all the time and I whined about it to a friend one night. She was like, "Uh, you aren't using the elliptical marquee?". To which I admitted, "No...I draw the bubbles in..." And she said, "LOL, that's CRAZY!" OMG she was right. I did a mental calculation of how much time I spent just LETTERING the pages and I wanted to pull out my hair. It was yet another thing about making comics that I dreaded. I didn't even think about it before that moment but I could <I>make</i> custom text bubble brushes just like I make texture brushes. Hahahaha!
(Hopefully it's pretty clear what each bubble means.)
All I have to do is 'click, click, click' all over where the words are and add the tails. To get the black border I select the white and right-click + stroke with 3 pixels. It makes all the bubbles look consistent too. After this epiphany I went and made a ton of custom brushes; tiles, patterns I'll use on the furniture, and even shingles on roofs and the cobblestone for the town. All this stuff will save sooo much time. And now I won't want to strip myself bald while lettering.
But I sort of hate to admit I'm so codependent on Photoshop...
Anyway, I've rambled enough. There's a bunch of other stuff I want to rant about but I need to figure out how I did some of those FX again first... I don't even know if this so much helped anyone or made you all realize I'm crazy...
On to chapter six!
