Sketchy the Sunflower

Because sometimes you're waiting for software to install* and you haven't posted any new content on your blog in a while, so why not?

*Trying again with the Adobe Photoshop Elements. Got the IT pro on it. We'll see what happens.

Dreamlocked Rough Pages 5 and 6

Hey, everybody! Because I'm just soooo proud of them, here are the rough drafts of pages 5 and 6 of my graphic novel project.

I originally drew the pages in pencil, but as is evident from other posts on this blog, pencil doesn't show up very well once it's been scanned, so I doctored these pages up just a little bit. When I scanned the pages in, I lowered the brightness and increased the contrast of the scans just a leetle bit. Then I opened them up in a free photo editing program called PhotoFiltre (because I'm not a real artist or anything like that and I can't afford to have Photoshop just for the fun of it). I applied a filter called Comic Book, which made the lines show up darker, and then I bumped the contrast up just a little bit more. I don't like to mess with the contrast too much, because it just makes the art look awful and weird when I do. I think the filter helps a lot.

Page 5 is my favorite page of everything I've penciled so far.

I'm going to begin inking tonight so my partner can get the pages into InDesign. I'm completely terrified. Usually, if I'm going to screw up any given piece of art, it'll be when I'm inking it. I've got scans of everything, so hopefully all will not be lost if I make a major boo-boo, but there's still a ton of potential for this stage of the process to go horribly wrong. That's why I've been putting it off, but I don't have time to do that anymore.

Wish me luck! Hopefully I'll be able to show you some nice inked scans soon!