Sigune's How Not To Draw Comics - Part XIV
Mmmmokay, I did promise to update the comic more frequently, and lo, the last update was in March… -_- Since I still want to have the whole story posted before Deathly Hallows, I will have to do a serious effort to accelerate :D. Shorter entries, maybe? - because I think that it’s too late for me to learn and compose my posts more quickly. Hm. I’ll see what I can do. Actually, with this particular page it can’t be too difficult to keep it short… :-)
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
Page Seven
Page Eight
Page Nine
Page Ten
Page Eleven
(Five more pages to go…)
You Are Here:
Fed up with Severus’s spying, Sirius has set the Slytherin a trap: he lures him to the tunnel under the Whomping Willow on a night with a full moon. Hoping to catch the Marauders at one of their pranks, Snape sneaks out of Hogwarts and enters the tunnel under the school grounds. It is only then that he realises there may be something fishy going on. As he progresses through the tunnel, he begins to feel uncomfortable…
(For some reason, this ended up on one of my page 12 sketch pages…)
20. A Few Goodies
The difficulties I had with page twelve were the same as those with page eleven: there was the darkness, and anatomical problems due to the fact that Snape crouches throughout the tunnel scene. I did my best to come up with a few variations in the crouching poses, attempting to keep the page visually interesting. On the spur of the moment, I inserted an instance of situational humour - as you probably know by now, I can rarely resist the urge to undermine tension and angst with a touch of absolute silliness… ;P
As I said in one of my first comic posts, the thing that attracted me most about Snape’s adventure under the Hogwarts grounds is the emotional intensity - years later, Snape still hasn’t got over the events. Some ficcers and theorists have it that he plunges headfirst into what he knows to be a dangerous situation; personally I thought the traumatic effect would be much greater if he had no idea what to expect and entered the tunnel absolutely guileless. This means, of course, that in my story the great shock has to come at the point where Snape understands he has been lured into the proximity of a werewolf. The challenge is to render the impact of this realisation in a credible way.
The main source of fun in drawing this comic is for me the opportunity to draw expressive Snapes, so while sketching I couldn’t resist trying out several facial expressions, even going beyond the scope of the page on which I was working at that moment.
More crouchies, and hands… As you can see, I didn’t exactly find this easy :-).
21. Some Layout Thingies (and Pencils)
My usual way of creating a page is to ink over my original pencils, meaning that the pencils are of course always lost. In the case of page twelve, I made a scan of them - just for once. I seem to recall that my main reason for this was that I liked the pencils of the last panel very much and wanted to preserve them somehow. It is perhaps also of interest that in the case of this page, I actually made a last-minute change in the layout after I had made the pencil scan.
As you can see, my pencils are hardly impressive, especially as the tunnel pages have little to no backgrounds. I drew the backgrounds while inking; they are all cross-hatching. I am also not in the habit of indicating which surfaces have to be black. More often than not, I figure a large part of this out while I am already in the process of inking; this is especially the case with Snape’s hair. My main concern is to have clean lines, so that I can keep my inking mistakes at a minimum.
The tunnel is rather long and Snape’s journey takes a while; unless I was inclined to use text to the effect of, “He went on for what seemed like hours” or something, I had to find a way to indicate the distance. This could easily become boring as nothing really happens until Snape has almost reached the Shrieking Shack; I therefore didn’t want to give the journey itself a lot of page time. I had to give this some thought, and eventually decided to draw unusually narrow strips, which would allow me to cram a lot of travelling Snapesies in a small space. Normally I am not very enthusiastic about this procedure because I draw on A4 paper, meaning that if I use narrow strips, I have to draw the characters really tiny and run the risk of messy inking - if the ink runs even a little, everything looks smudgy. In this case, though, I couldn’t see any other options; I preferred the teensy-tiny drawings to having to use text.
When you compare the pencilled page with the inked one, you will see that I changed the top two strips, extending the first one and cutting the panel in which James Potter makes his appearance in the tunnel. I thought that was better for the visual continuity.
Another layout element is that at the bottom, I allowed the page to burst out of its usual rectangle; I thought that would increase the impact of the dangerous situation dawning on Snape. I have had real problems sticking to the rectangular page format in this comic, especially towards the end. This is not a problem for a story posted on the Net, but it can be a bit of a pain when it is supposed to be printed; in that case, it has to be made to fit into a fixed format, and I suspect that my more unusual pages tend to cause layout people quite a bit of trouble… Being me, I never think of that sort of thing while working :/.
Next: Werewolf!
The Comic So Far:
Page One
Page Two
Page Three
Page Four
Page Five
Page Six
Page Seven
Page Eight
Page Nine
Page Ten
Page Eleven
(Five more pages to go…)
You Are Here:
Fed up with Severus’s spying, Sirius has set the Slytherin a trap: he lures him to the tunnel under the Whomping Willow on a night with a full moon. Hoping to catch the Marauders at one of their pranks, Snape sneaks out of Hogwarts and enters the tunnel under the school grounds. It is only then that he realises there may be something fishy going on. As he progresses through the tunnel, he begins to feel uncomfortable…
(For some reason, this ended up on one of my page 12 sketch pages…)
20. A Few Goodies
The difficulties I had with page twelve were the same as those with page eleven: there was the darkness, and anatomical problems due to the fact that Snape crouches throughout the tunnel scene. I did my best to come up with a few variations in the crouching poses, attempting to keep the page visually interesting. On the spur of the moment, I inserted an instance of situational humour - as you probably know by now, I can rarely resist the urge to undermine tension and angst with a touch of absolute silliness… ;P
As I said in one of my first comic posts, the thing that attracted me most about Snape’s adventure under the Hogwarts grounds is the emotional intensity - years later, Snape still hasn’t got over the events. Some ficcers and theorists have it that he plunges headfirst into what he knows to be a dangerous situation; personally I thought the traumatic effect would be much greater if he had no idea what to expect and entered the tunnel absolutely guileless. This means, of course, that in my story the great shock has to come at the point where Snape understands he has been lured into the proximity of a werewolf. The challenge is to render the impact of this realisation in a credible way.
The main source of fun in drawing this comic is for me the opportunity to draw expressive Snapes, so while sketching I couldn’t resist trying out several facial expressions, even going beyond the scope of the page on which I was working at that moment.
More crouchies, and hands… As you can see, I didn’t exactly find this easy :-).
21. Some Layout Thingies (and Pencils)
My usual way of creating a page is to ink over my original pencils, meaning that the pencils are of course always lost. In the case of page twelve, I made a scan of them - just for once. I seem to recall that my main reason for this was that I liked the pencils of the last panel very much and wanted to preserve them somehow. It is perhaps also of interest that in the case of this page, I actually made a last-minute change in the layout after I had made the pencil scan.
As you can see, my pencils are hardly impressive, especially as the tunnel pages have little to no backgrounds. I drew the backgrounds while inking; they are all cross-hatching. I am also not in the habit of indicating which surfaces have to be black. More often than not, I figure a large part of this out while I am already in the process of inking; this is especially the case with Snape’s hair. My main concern is to have clean lines, so that I can keep my inking mistakes at a minimum.
The tunnel is rather long and Snape’s journey takes a while; unless I was inclined to use text to the effect of, “He went on for what seemed like hours” or something, I had to find a way to indicate the distance. This could easily become boring as nothing really happens until Snape has almost reached the Shrieking Shack; I therefore didn’t want to give the journey itself a lot of page time. I had to give this some thought, and eventually decided to draw unusually narrow strips, which would allow me to cram a lot of travelling Snapesies in a small space. Normally I am not very enthusiastic about this procedure because I draw on A4 paper, meaning that if I use narrow strips, I have to draw the characters really tiny and run the risk of messy inking - if the ink runs even a little, everything looks smudgy. In this case, though, I couldn’t see any other options; I preferred the teensy-tiny drawings to having to use text.
When you compare the pencilled page with the inked one, you will see that I changed the top two strips, extending the first one and cutting the panel in which James Potter makes his appearance in the tunnel. I thought that was better for the visual continuity.
Another layout element is that at the bottom, I allowed the page to burst out of its usual rectangle; I thought that would increase the impact of the dangerous situation dawning on Snape. I have had real problems sticking to the rectangular page format in this comic, especially towards the end. This is not a problem for a story posted on the Net, but it can be a bit of a pain when it is supposed to be printed; in that case, it has to be made to fit into a fixed format, and I suspect that my more unusual pages tend to cause layout people quite a bit of trouble… Being me, I never think of that sort of thing while working :/.
Next: Werewolf!