My Comic: page six

Plug, plug, pluggin' away! Just finished page six of my book and as usual it took me longer to figure out the colors, yada yada yada. Anyway, the main difficulty was this outside scene now had 'real colors' in it. My main character's uniform is for the first time revealed to the reader... and to myself!

Yep, all this time I had no idea what color my main characters' uniform was to be! I've always colored her in a monochromatic fashion, I never really stopped to think about her color scheme. Anyways, after much mulling over and trying out different colors, it occured to me there was only one color that would work for her all those other times I colored her in: white.


My friend, Roque, cautioned me though: since he and his studio (Ghostbot) had done a pilot where a character was all in white before. He told me it'd be a tricky thing to do. And sure enough, I was raiding my collection of Samurai jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars animated (Genndy Tartakovsky version) for some color help!

I got her colors to work on the page finally, but there was something missing to her being in all white. Something about the color of her visor was bugging me. It seemed so plain. As usual, when stuck with color theory, I messed around with Photoshops' Hue/Saturation adjustment tool (best thing ever)! And now her visor becomes a very distinctive part about her, and gives me a nice variable to mess around with when I stick her into tricky color schemes. plus while coloring it in, it also gave me ways to incorporate the visor color into story telling too, so it ended up being a win/win situation.

A little side note/ bruised ego rant: the visor color and her design, I've realized, is a tip of the hat to Battle of the planets. I hadn't realized that's what I drew inspiration from until a friend of mine pointed it out! Makes sense! I even have a sequence in the book that's like the intro where they all float down in a circle (Silver hawks does this in some of their episodes too if I remember correctly!).

My ego has taken quite a beating realizing that my stuff isn't very original, but I've gotten over it after with awhile. It's quite a humbling experience, mind you, and really knocked the wind out of my sails for awhile. Anyway, I picked myself back up and remembered what I originally set out to do on this book.

I wanted to have fun while drawing comics. And I wanted to tap into that same fun I had as a child that I believe is missing in me nowadays. Apparently, I am totally tapping into that childhood better than I thought! I have found working on these pages has brought back the sense of enjoyment I used to have when I drew comics for myself a long, long time ago. The main thing that gets me over my unoriginality is that so long as I'm aware of the people I'm ripping off ("influenced by" if that's too harsh!) and simply embrace it, and strive to build on their knowledge, eventually I'll get better.

Heck, I'm ripping off Yoshitaka Amano, Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori, Genndy Tartakovsky, Jack kirby and frikking Sonic the Hedgehog to name a few! Hopefully I'll learn a thing or three from these people (and hedgehogs)!

My giant sized ego always makes me forget this truth: I am far from being anywhere good yet. But hopefully with this comic book, I can start working all my assorted kinks out! So thank you for dropping by and taking a look at my personal work-in-progress, truly warts and all! And that's it for today! Good day and God Bless!

P.S. And I know this has been stuck in your brain since I mentioned it; sweet intro isn't it? Gonna have to steal something from there! ;)