Sushu's Sketchblog

Wooo! It took me all day, but I wrote, penciled, inked, shaded, and scanned the Epilogue! :D

So here it is:


( 3 more pages, and a discussion of differences from the original story )

Well, after the 2-month interlude that is known as "The Holidays", I'm back with a few more pages! These I started on Sunday, and finished today, so I'm definitely getting faster at it. Only 4 pages, though.

I'm glad that I made the character sheet way back when because I had forgotten much of the details of the characters -- whether they were left or right-handed, which direction the sword insignia faced, and most problematically, the proportion of facial features and the size of the face. Thus, there are some awkward faces here.

On the other hand, I feel like I'm getting better at backgrounds -- both the shading type and the specific background image type. (This being set out in the nature helped, but designing a simple background also helped.)

I tried to be more serious about considering light sources when doing the shading this time ... with varying degrees of effectiveness. Basically, it looks all right from a distance, but weird in close-ups. :/

Next part is going to be a narrative and artistic challenge as (a) things actually start happening, and (b) I deviate ever farther from the original story. (Or at least what I remember from the original story)


( and 3 more after the cut )

So one of the reasons why I ended China Comics, was that I wanted to try my hand at drawing comics with actual plot. When I started China Comics, I didn't feel very confident about my ability to tell stories and write dialogue and convey information, so I just picked one: I conveyed information, from my point of view, in single pages. But as I worked on my China comic, I realized that even though I got pretty good at drawing lots of people very quickly, I wasn't actually practicing any of the other skills needed to tell a good story in comic form. For example, panel layout and pacing is a completely different beast in a story comic vs. a China comic.

So, first I tried writing my own script for a short comic (24 pages) about graduates from "superhero college" having to reconcile their youthful idealism with the realities of getting a job and settling down. I got through character design and even as far as laying out the first 4 pages, when I realized that the story structure was really weak -- no real antagonists or challenges, no real character changes. In short, I realized that telling a good story and drawing a good story are two different skills that I would need to work on.

I decided to work on the latter first: drawing a good story. I took a martial arts short story that I read back in 2007, and wrote out a script for it. Back when I first read the story, I had actually started trying to convert the short story into a comic, but back then I was too close to the original story -- I tried too hard to preserve the original language, and immediately ran into problems, because the first scene involved a Chinese song that was a play on the main character's name. This time, 4 years later, I just went by my memory of the main themes and the general outline of the plot, and the script worked out much better. Then I did some character design, and then drew Act I.

The goal of this comic is not to present a finished piece, but rather, practice the skill of telling a story. So I just used a ball point pen and a blue pencil, and I haven't done any touch-ups. The scanner has also been bugging out, which explains the fuzziness. :/

Even though I was using someone else's story, I got to practice a lot of different things. Here are some lessons and observations:

- There's a reason comic names are generally short: to conserve space!
- Not quite sure what to do with backgrounds in close-up shots of characters. I tried a variety of shading/spotlights, textures, etc. I think it's pretty jarring, but on the other hand, blank white space would have been too empty, and actual background would have made the panel too busy. Suggestions?
- Fighting is hard to draw! Motion lines are even harder!
- Getting better at character design (assigning a specific "shape" and a distincting outfit "style" to each person helps!)
- Still bad at drawing characters consistently. I think the key is to keep the proportions consistent: eye to face, head to body, etc.
- I had to keep re-working the dialogue. I wrote it once, then revised it before pencilling to make it shorter, then revised it while pencilling to make it fit into speech bubbles, then revised it one last time while inking to take out more of the awkwardness.
- Scene to scene transitions are hard! I feel like I'm okay at doing panels that transition from moment to moment, but whenever I have to jump more than 5 minutes in space/time, the panel transition falters. The change is too small for a caption, but seems too big for a panel gutter....

Anyway, without further ado:

( It's called 'Sixteen', and there are 4 more pages here )