Odd and the Frost Giants page 7 (chapter 1)

Finally had the time to finish this page. Woo-hoo!

Cheerio.

Let's try again: Odd page 7 inks...

There. Finally Blogger managed to do it.

Cheerio.

Good news, bad news...

Right.

The bad news is that I've had ridiculously busy week at work, so I haven't been able to finish the next page.

The good news however is that I've finished inks on page 7 and 8 and page 9 is almost finished (both inks and colors... I did it actually before page one as a test, and it only needs small modifications)

I would post the inks on page 7 here, but for some reason the Blogger is unable to upload the picture. I'll try again bit later.

Cheerio.

PS. Went to local movie theater to see Porco Rosso, and liked it enormously.

Page 6: baby steps

Ok. As promised, here's some stuff about how I do the pages... First of all I naturally cut the story into page-size chunks (before I did a single page I had divided the whole chapter one, and I think I will continue doing this one chapter at a time). At the same time I do small "matchbox-sketches" of the pages to get some rough idea about the size of panels and overall composition of a spread (yes, even though I post these one page at a time, I'm designing them as spreads)

Then I start pencilling single pages. First I do the panel outlines and then place the textboxes (or speech bubbles) at this point I write the text by hand to get an idea about the size of the box. Then I do pencils. After that, in order to save time, I do inks on top of the pencils. (normally I would scan the pencils and change the lines to light blue... well, light cyan to be more exact... print the colored pencils on a heavy stock paper and ink on that... that way if I make a mistake with ink I can just print another copy and start over without screwing up the pencils)... sorry about the crappy photos. I took them with my phone.

After finishing the inks I scan the page, clean up the pencils and add contrast (all this in photoshop). Then I open the page in Illustrator and "trace" it to vector-format. I paste the vectorized page into Indesign where I type the texts and copy/paste the texts and the vectors back into Photoshop where I then do the colors... err greys.


Right. Someone might think that it sounds awfully complicated and why am I vectorizing the page... Well, in short, look the results below. The first panel is just scanned lineart (without any modifications), the second panel is cleaned up lineart and the last is vectorized lineart. As you can see vectorizing cleans up the ragged ink lines and makes the picture smoother... and I like that.


There. That's the way I do it.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 6 (chapter 1)

Right. I promised to Dan that I would say few words (and show some pictures) about the technique and the different steps from a sketch to a finished page... but when I managed to finish this page, I just wanted to post this as soon as possible. I'll show the steps in my next post. Promise.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 5 (chapter 1)

...and I'm currently finishing the pencils for page 6.

Cheerio.

Odd fonts

I was asked about the lettering of Odd, and I think it's right and proper to tell this publicly....

From the beginning I wanted to have editable text so I can correct typos etc. more easily AND since I don't have Fontographer to create a font of my own (and my hand writing sucks pretty much anyhow) I took the easy way out and downloaded few free fonts from the net.

If you like fonts (like I do) you should REALLY visit...

http://www.dafont.com/

or

http://www.1001freefonts.com/

Cheerio.

Jouni

Odd and the Frost Giants page 4 (chapter 1)

...and I'm inking page 5 as we speak.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants pages 2-3 (chapter 1)

There. First two pages.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants

Ahem...

So, ladies and gentlemen, this will be my new mystery project.

When I heard Neil Gaiman was writing another story obout Norse gods I got immediately interested... I've liked very much the way Neil has handled old gods like Odin and Thor and Loki in his past stories... and when I read the beginning of chapter three of Odd from Neil's journal, I knew I wanted to illustrate the story.

After reading the whole thing I started doing sketches and realized I was actually planning a COMIC and not just individual illustrations. The last time I had done anything in comics format was around 2002 (Neil's Babycakes), so I thought it was about time to try and sharpen my very rusty comics skills. I emailed few of the sketches to Neil and asked his permission to try this... and he said yes.

This Odd and the Frost Giants is my ADAPTATION of Neil's story. I try to change the text as little as possible, but since we're talking about two different mediums here, some things have to be changed. This is also MY adaptation of Neil's story and even though I'm trying to be true to the original story, it will be also my view of the story... and I'm sure there will be people who think that I'm getting something wrong or doing something wrong, but I also hope that there will be people who like what I'm doing'...

So. This is where it starts. I will post spreads/pages here as soon as I finish them. Unfortunately I'm doing this on my (very limited) "free time" and therefore I cannot guarrantee when I'll post the next page, but I try to post something new at least once a week (if not finished pages, then sketches or inks or thumbnails or something) furthermore I cannot even guarrantee that I'm able to do the whole story. I've estimated that Odd would take roughly 100 pages as a comic and thats quite a few pictures and quite a few hours. But one thing I can guarrantee: whether it's 10 or 50 or 150 pages I manage to do, I'll do them as well as I possibly can... and I'm going to enjoy every second of doing them.

Oh, by the way, I'll post pages 2 and 3 tomorrow. Hope to see you again then... and feel free to comment.

Cheerio.