Sigune's How Not To Draw Comics - Part V
In real Sigune fashion, the next instalment of the as yet nameless comic (suggestions for a title are welcome!) is very, very late. Therefore, in case you need to refresh your memory, here are the links to pages one and two. Alternatively, you can follow the ‘comics’ tag (I have only just discovered tagging, and have triumphantly gone back to earlier entries to add these useful little linkies).
James Potter
6. Latest Developments
Because I am under time pressure as a result of a publication date - I need to have my story, a full twenty pages, ready and done by the end of March - I have taken to doing all the pencils for all the coming pages first, and then do all the inking. That way, I’ll be sure about the story’s length and layout and encounter as few unpleasant surprises as possible - or that, at least, is the idea. At the time of writing I am one panel away from finishing the pencils for page thirteen. Concretely, this means that I still have to draw pages fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. Page nineteen is the picture of sobbing Severus in the corridor that I posted in one of my first comics entries; page twenty is actually page one, the title page. The latter has been sketched and thought out, so as soon as I actually have a title (the working title is “Vengeance is Bitter”), I could actually draw and finish it :D.
My ever-optimistic assumption is that page fourteen should be the last that will give me trouble with the layout - it will be action-packed - and that the remaining pages shouldn’t be too difficult to plan as they are mainly conversation and dénouement. The inking, which is the most intensive labour (work of the kind that numbs your fingers, bleh), hasn’t got any further than page eight. So, whereas I have ‘only’ five pages left to draw, there are still ten waiting to be inked… And believe me, that is a lot. Before there was mention of the publication and I was in no hurry whatsoever, it would take me about a week to produce one page, drawing and inking. That would mean about one week a page, which is two months and a half for ten, which means it’s going to be a really really close one even if I manage to work more quickly, considering the fact that my disc with scans still has to find its way across the Big Pond to rufftoon as well, and I can’t assume there won’t be some weeks where I can do little or no work due to unexpected circumstances… Dear dear, what an adventure ;-)…
7. A Tiny Note on New Characters
Page Three introduces no less than four new characters to the story: James Potter, Sirius Black, Lily Evans and Professor McGonagall. Those who have been with me form the beginning of this LJ may remember my entries on how long it took me to get Snape right in my drawings, and how many sketches it took until I was happy with how he looked. My OFC, too, went through many phases until she was presentable. Oddly enough, it didn’t take me nearly as long to acceptably draw most of the other Potterverse characters that appear in my stories. Sirius certainly flopped onto the page just like this - he may or may not be to your taste, but this is how he looks for me. One of the first finished pieces of fanart that I made was a picture of the four Marauders. I have looked through my sketches, but I can’t find any studies for their faces - it seems I took a piece of paper and just drew them like that. My first sketchy McGonagall, too, looks very much the way she still looks today. The only face you will find in the sketches below is Lily’s, for her expression; and I’m still having trouble with Dumbledore, especially his nose :-) - I’ll have to sort that out by the time he makes an appearance on page sixteen.
Of course you may argue that other characters’ faces, the way I draw them, are just less detailed and less complex than Snape’s, so that it logically takes far less time to ‘get them right.’ Maybe that is the only reason; but then there are few characters about whose appearance we know quite as much. Anyway, that’s my excuse in case I get accused of making the others a tad bland by comparison :D. I think I have mentioned it before: one of the challenges of drawing Snape has been to me that I have needed to rethink the way I draw faces - that is, his is a very uncharacteristic one for me. The others are just more normal. My main source of fun is their hair, which I think will be obvious in Lily below, and in James on later pages (I have just noticed that on page three his hair is rather tame. It’s going to look better on twelve and thirteen). For the rest I try to add details like bags, shoes and things like that. In the sketch of James above you may notice that he wears trainers, whereas Sirius mostly ends up with loafers and Peter with a more classic pair of shoes. James also holds his wand in a different manner (much like Dan Radcliffe in the movies) than Severus, whom you will usually see with his index finger stretched out (the way I would hold a wand if I had one).
8. Plot and Its Discontents
The fifth in my highly chaotic series of How Not To Draw Comics (I just had to stress that :D) will focus a little more on the plot trouble of which I became aware while giving shape to the page below. Yes indeed, it is only page three and I already had a problem. That is what you get when you have no metier and throw yourself into such a thing as a comic without carefully considering the story’s scenario. Here is what I struggled with:
The main plot is fixed in canon. Sirius Black tricks Severus into following the tunnel that leads to the Shrieking Shack, and James Potter saves him from a horrible fate. We also know that Snape has seen Remus Lupin and Madam Pomfrey leave the castle.
Now, one thing many readers have a problem believing in connection to the werewolf episode is that Snape didn’t make a connection between Lupin’s disappearances and the phases of the moon. Another strange element is that the normally cautious Snape should have unsuspectingly taken Sirius’s bait. I thought that if I made the tunnel part take place immediately after Severus had spotted Lupin on the Hogwarts grounds on a night with a full moon, Snape’s action and oversight would seem particularly foolish, so I wanted a sort of interlude. More specifically, I wanted to highlight what kind of relationship existed between Snape and the Marauders, and to stress his snooping as motivated by his desire to get the quartet expelled. I did at one time intend to include the Worst Memory, but I’m not very much in favour of flashbacks and will avoid them if I can. (In the meantime I have chosen a Worst Memory scene for the title page, to set the tone.) Ideally, I wanted a prank that could be the proverbial last straw, or at least trigger a reaction on Snape’s part.
One problem - and I suppose the main reason why you will never find me writing any of the Marauders at the centre of a story - is that I am not a prankster at all, and find it very difficult to think up stuff like that. I have no imagination whatsoever for tricks or stunts. So I came up with a silly tripping incident. I know it’s lame, but I imagine that wouldn’t have kept it from happening. Here is what I thought I would include:
1) James casts a jinx that causes Severus to trip just as he is about to enter Transfiguration class.
2) Severus drops his bag, and his inkbottle breaks, spilling its contents over his Transfiguration homework.
3) Lily Evans walks past on her way to another class, distracting James.
4) While James has his back turned, Severus sets him on fire.
5) McGonagall sees this.
6) James calls for help.
7) Severus is scolded by McGonagall, who also takes house points from Slytherin.
8) Severus has to hand in an unreadable homework.
9) Severus tries to explain what made him cast the spell in the first place, but McGonagall won’t listen and tells him to grow up.
10) Severus is indignant and vows to take revenge.
I started sketching and came up with these thingies:
I don’t know to what extent it is obvious from the disembodied heads and other Snapey body parts, but the idea was that he’d land flat on his belly, then extract the spoiled essay from his bag. James would go on his knees for Lily, who’d laugh at him and walk away. As he stood up again, Snape, still lying on the ground, would take his wand (or not - I suppose I preferred the hand alone) and set fire to James’s robes.
In the next bit, McGonagall originally had quite a lot to say about Snape’s misbehaviour, and I imagined a page-sized panel in which the Slytherins looked at him angrily for loosing them points. For a mere interlude, the episode grew to an epic scale and was going to take up far more page time that was at all desirable: after all, the focus was to be on the werewolf episode. So I decided to condense everything, and struggled to squeeze points one to six as outlined above onto one page. The following two oversized ‘thumbnails’ bear witness to my efforts :-).
Here I was rather optimistic about the number of things I could fit onto one page. In the upper strip I thought I would find space for separate panels depicting the falling schoolbag and Lily Evans’s approach; in the bottom strip I had a kneeling James, but nowhere to put McGonagall. On the positive side, I had a Snape-cum-homework that I rather liked, and so I decided (not for the first time) to give the bit that I liked priority, and build the rest of the page around it.
This is the layout I came up with next:
I was apparently still convinced that I could pull off the entire arrangement of the upper strip, because it’s identical to the earlier design - indeed most of it is. The clumsy black lines on the left show where the Severus from the earlier sketch is to come, and how much space he’d take up. Now I saw just how cramped everything was going to look if Snape was to set fire to a kneeling James (who is also outline-only here). I decided he would have to stand up, no matter how much I liked the idea of him performing the yearning romantic lover, and make room. I needed Snape to be further away from him, and I wanted to include McGonagall in the panel as well.
Eventually, I settled for this:
In my previous comics entry I announced this page as ‘possibly my worst’, and you can probably see why, even without having set eyes on the others. I think the forced condensation of the storytelling shows in the quaint shape of the panel bottom left, and worse, in the fact that Sirius’s balloon of text seems to belong with James. I didn’t see where else it could go.
Comments I’ve had from other people were that James ‘looks like a complete dork’ (dixit my beta Elfie), and that Snape ‘looks like a total sissy’, except in the last panel ‘where at least he looks manly’ (dixit my sister). I personally liked the last panel when I drew it, but I don’t anymore. It was one of my first frontal views of Severus and I think I can do it better now. But I do like how Lily came out and, despite my Snape love, I find I have a soft spot for James in this story. The thing is that Severus takes himself so terribly seriously, and James is a welcome change from that. Elfie thought he is an idiot for declaring his affection for Lily in such a high-flown manner, but I see him as the kind of boy who gets away with it. He is plucky and self-assured. If Snape would try it, he’d be totally ridiculous, but coming from James I think it’s funny, and sweet in a way. At least that is the idea I wanted to convey. I tried to make him look a little roguish - he knows what he’s doing and that he’s more likely to win Lily over through his sense of humour than anything else. Or so I imagine.
Finally: “AAUGH” is a sound effect I first encountered in Calvin & Hobbes. I love it, and I was happy to find a place in which to use it :-).
Next: Up Close and Personal with Minerva McGonagall.
James Potter
6. Latest Developments
Because I am under time pressure as a result of a publication date - I need to have my story, a full twenty pages, ready and done by the end of March - I have taken to doing all the pencils for all the coming pages first, and then do all the inking. That way, I’ll be sure about the story’s length and layout and encounter as few unpleasant surprises as possible - or that, at least, is the idea. At the time of writing I am one panel away from finishing the pencils for page thirteen. Concretely, this means that I still have to draw pages fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. Page nineteen is the picture of sobbing Severus in the corridor that I posted in one of my first comics entries; page twenty is actually page one, the title page. The latter has been sketched and thought out, so as soon as I actually have a title (the working title is “Vengeance is Bitter”), I could actually draw and finish it :D.
My ever-optimistic assumption is that page fourteen should be the last that will give me trouble with the layout - it will be action-packed - and that the remaining pages shouldn’t be too difficult to plan as they are mainly conversation and dénouement. The inking, which is the most intensive labour (work of the kind that numbs your fingers, bleh), hasn’t got any further than page eight. So, whereas I have ‘only’ five pages left to draw, there are still ten waiting to be inked… And believe me, that is a lot. Before there was mention of the publication and I was in no hurry whatsoever, it would take me about a week to produce one page, drawing and inking. That would mean about one week a page, which is two months and a half for ten, which means it’s going to be a really really close one even if I manage to work more quickly, considering the fact that my disc with scans still has to find its way across the Big Pond to rufftoon as well, and I can’t assume there won’t be some weeks where I can do little or no work due to unexpected circumstances… Dear dear, what an adventure ;-)…
7. A Tiny Note on New Characters
Page Three introduces no less than four new characters to the story: James Potter, Sirius Black, Lily Evans and Professor McGonagall. Those who have been with me form the beginning of this LJ may remember my entries on how long it took me to get Snape right in my drawings, and how many sketches it took until I was happy with how he looked. My OFC, too, went through many phases until she was presentable. Oddly enough, it didn’t take me nearly as long to acceptably draw most of the other Potterverse characters that appear in my stories. Sirius certainly flopped onto the page just like this - he may or may not be to your taste, but this is how he looks for me. One of the first finished pieces of fanart that I made was a picture of the four Marauders. I have looked through my sketches, but I can’t find any studies for their faces - it seems I took a piece of paper and just drew them like that. My first sketchy McGonagall, too, looks very much the way she still looks today. The only face you will find in the sketches below is Lily’s, for her expression; and I’m still having trouble with Dumbledore, especially his nose :-) - I’ll have to sort that out by the time he makes an appearance on page sixteen.
Of course you may argue that other characters’ faces, the way I draw them, are just less detailed and less complex than Snape’s, so that it logically takes far less time to ‘get them right.’ Maybe that is the only reason; but then there are few characters about whose appearance we know quite as much. Anyway, that’s my excuse in case I get accused of making the others a tad bland by comparison :D. I think I have mentioned it before: one of the challenges of drawing Snape has been to me that I have needed to rethink the way I draw faces - that is, his is a very uncharacteristic one for me. The others are just more normal. My main source of fun is their hair, which I think will be obvious in Lily below, and in James on later pages (I have just noticed that on page three his hair is rather tame. It’s going to look better on twelve and thirteen). For the rest I try to add details like bags, shoes and things like that. In the sketch of James above you may notice that he wears trainers, whereas Sirius mostly ends up with loafers and Peter with a more classic pair of shoes. James also holds his wand in a different manner (much like Dan Radcliffe in the movies) than Severus, whom you will usually see with his index finger stretched out (the way I would hold a wand if I had one).
8. Plot and Its Discontents
The fifth in my highly chaotic series of How Not To Draw Comics (I just had to stress that :D) will focus a little more on the plot trouble of which I became aware while giving shape to the page below. Yes indeed, it is only page three and I already had a problem. That is what you get when you have no metier and throw yourself into such a thing as a comic without carefully considering the story’s scenario. Here is what I struggled with:
The main plot is fixed in canon. Sirius Black tricks Severus into following the tunnel that leads to the Shrieking Shack, and James Potter saves him from a horrible fate. We also know that Snape has seen Remus Lupin and Madam Pomfrey leave the castle.
Now, one thing many readers have a problem believing in connection to the werewolf episode is that Snape didn’t make a connection between Lupin’s disappearances and the phases of the moon. Another strange element is that the normally cautious Snape should have unsuspectingly taken Sirius’s bait. I thought that if I made the tunnel part take place immediately after Severus had spotted Lupin on the Hogwarts grounds on a night with a full moon, Snape’s action and oversight would seem particularly foolish, so I wanted a sort of interlude. More specifically, I wanted to highlight what kind of relationship existed between Snape and the Marauders, and to stress his snooping as motivated by his desire to get the quartet expelled. I did at one time intend to include the Worst Memory, but I’m not very much in favour of flashbacks and will avoid them if I can. (In the meantime I have chosen a Worst Memory scene for the title page, to set the tone.) Ideally, I wanted a prank that could be the proverbial last straw, or at least trigger a reaction on Snape’s part.
One problem - and I suppose the main reason why you will never find me writing any of the Marauders at the centre of a story - is that I am not a prankster at all, and find it very difficult to think up stuff like that. I have no imagination whatsoever for tricks or stunts. So I came up with a silly tripping incident. I know it’s lame, but I imagine that wouldn’t have kept it from happening. Here is what I thought I would include:
1) James casts a jinx that causes Severus to trip just as he is about to enter Transfiguration class.
2) Severus drops his bag, and his inkbottle breaks, spilling its contents over his Transfiguration homework.
3) Lily Evans walks past on her way to another class, distracting James.
4) While James has his back turned, Severus sets him on fire.
5) McGonagall sees this.
6) James calls for help.
7) Severus is scolded by McGonagall, who also takes house points from Slytherin.
8) Severus has to hand in an unreadable homework.
9) Severus tries to explain what made him cast the spell in the first place, but McGonagall won’t listen and tells him to grow up.
10) Severus is indignant and vows to take revenge.
I started sketching and came up with these thingies:
I don’t know to what extent it is obvious from the disembodied heads and other Snapey body parts, but the idea was that he’d land flat on his belly, then extract the spoiled essay from his bag. James would go on his knees for Lily, who’d laugh at him and walk away. As he stood up again, Snape, still lying on the ground, would take his wand (or not - I suppose I preferred the hand alone) and set fire to James’s robes.
In the next bit, McGonagall originally had quite a lot to say about Snape’s misbehaviour, and I imagined a page-sized panel in which the Slytherins looked at him angrily for loosing them points. For a mere interlude, the episode grew to an epic scale and was going to take up far more page time that was at all desirable: after all, the focus was to be on the werewolf episode. So I decided to condense everything, and struggled to squeeze points one to six as outlined above onto one page. The following two oversized ‘thumbnails’ bear witness to my efforts :-).
Here I was rather optimistic about the number of things I could fit onto one page. In the upper strip I thought I would find space for separate panels depicting the falling schoolbag and Lily Evans’s approach; in the bottom strip I had a kneeling James, but nowhere to put McGonagall. On the positive side, I had a Snape-cum-homework that I rather liked, and so I decided (not for the first time) to give the bit that I liked priority, and build the rest of the page around it.
This is the layout I came up with next:
I was apparently still convinced that I could pull off the entire arrangement of the upper strip, because it’s identical to the earlier design - indeed most of it is. The clumsy black lines on the left show where the Severus from the earlier sketch is to come, and how much space he’d take up. Now I saw just how cramped everything was going to look if Snape was to set fire to a kneeling James (who is also outline-only here). I decided he would have to stand up, no matter how much I liked the idea of him performing the yearning romantic lover, and make room. I needed Snape to be further away from him, and I wanted to include McGonagall in the panel as well.
Eventually, I settled for this:
In my previous comics entry I announced this page as ‘possibly my worst’, and you can probably see why, even without having set eyes on the others. I think the forced condensation of the storytelling shows in the quaint shape of the panel bottom left, and worse, in the fact that Sirius’s balloon of text seems to belong with James. I didn’t see where else it could go.
Comments I’ve had from other people were that James ‘looks like a complete dork’ (dixit my beta Elfie), and that Snape ‘looks like a total sissy’, except in the last panel ‘where at least he looks manly’ (dixit my sister). I personally liked the last panel when I drew it, but I don’t anymore. It was one of my first frontal views of Severus and I think I can do it better now. But I do like how Lily came out and, despite my Snape love, I find I have a soft spot for James in this story. The thing is that Severus takes himself so terribly seriously, and James is a welcome change from that. Elfie thought he is an idiot for declaring his affection for Lily in such a high-flown manner, but I see him as the kind of boy who gets away with it. He is plucky and self-assured. If Snape would try it, he’d be totally ridiculous, but coming from James I think it’s funny, and sweet in a way. At least that is the idea I wanted to convey. I tried to make him look a little roguish - he knows what he’s doing and that he’s more likely to win Lily over through his sense of humour than anything else. Or so I imagine.
Finally: “AAUGH” is a sound effect I first encountered in Calvin & Hobbes. I love it, and I was happy to find a place in which to use it :-).
Next: Up Close and Personal with Minerva McGonagall.