Week 4 and 5

Yesterday the three weeks course ended. The past two weeks we have had Johan Krarup (http://jfkra.dk) and Lars Hornemann (http://larshorneman.blogspot.dk), both danish cartoonists, as teachers. Johan taught us the process of going from a concept/manuscript to drawings. This week Lars was there to help us ink our comics. It was also a very big part of the lesson to plan out how we could make the deadline, which was friday at 12 (13 if you didn't have lunch). This made a time schedule where we could use 3 hours per page. Of course it took much longer.

Anyway here is the product of three weeks of work ! :

I inked it all with a brush on A3 size paper. It was fun inking with a brush and I will definitely do it again. Most of the colors were done really fast friday morning in photoshop. When I realized that the line art reminded me a bit of a Will Eisner comic I had lying on my table all week I decided to be inspired by the colors too. And when I think about it, from the very beginning of this comic I wanted to do something that reminded of the structure of this Spirit story. So everything makes sense.
I thought I was going to color the pages better after the deadline yesterday, but then again it is nice to just be done with it. An important lesson I will really have to remember forever is that you don't finish your work - you release it.


Here is an Eisner page.

A very helpful exercise we did this week was to ink another persons page. I felt that when I wasn't working on my own stuff I could relax and experiment more. I switched a page with Fie. Her story is called Gehirnswitch and is set in the Ardennes some time towards the end of WW2, where a british soldier is killed. His brain is taken by the Nazis and put into a war robot. On this page he rebels against the Nazis:

It was also really inspiring to see what both Fie and Clara did when they had to ink pages from my comic.