Thursday Art Walk 234: Sorcery Con Leche

Thursday Art Walk brings you:
Sorcery con Leche

Last week I tried out a way to make a short comic, and it didn't work out so good. A combination of poor planning, lack of practice, and not actually knowing how to make poses work made for a less-than-stellar showing, so I figured I'd work extra hard today to show you that I can, in fact, do sequential art. Okay, it was mostly to prove it to myself that I'm not garbo at comics. It's literally been about 7 years since I last made comics... oof.

The first step in any comic is writing a script!

My incomprehensible scribblings.

My script was for a 3 panel comic, the fourth panel being my title card. The script goes like this:

• Panel 0 - Title Card. "Sorcery Con Leche". Maybe add a cup?
• Panel 1a - Tim standing and drinking coffee, Cap sitting at feet
• Cap: "Tim"
• Panel 1b - Tim sitting and drinking coffee, Cap sitting nearby.
• Cap: "Tim"
• Panel 1c - same as 1b
• Panel 2a, b, c - Cap looking up
• Cap: "We need to talk"
• Panel 3a: Tim spit take (standing)
• Panel 3b: Tim spit take (seated)
• Panel 3c: Tim spit take (standing, chair knocked over)

You may be wondering about all the letters after the numbers. See, I had three different possibilities on what I could maybe do with this comic. Scenario a, scenario b, scenario c. Since it's still just a 3 panel comic, and since the basic beats are the same, I put all three in the script. The basic beats are:

Tim at rest with Cap speaking up to him.
Cap at rest looking up at Tim.
Tim does a spit take.

You can kind of see scenario A playing out here, with stick figures.

Scenarios B and C

A clearer image of B and C

But how to lay out the panels? Well, I didn't have sticky notes around, so I had to make do with some non-sticky note cards. Sadly, they were a bit big for my page (who'd have thought that legal size paper would still be a bit small for a proper comic?) So they're a little crowded.

The layout, but vertical because my phone doesn't listen.

The layout horizontally, sketched onto the page.

Now, obviously, I want to ink this all in at some point (hopefully later tonight, because I've got the fever now, and the only cure is more comics), but at this juncture, it would've taken too much labor to go around looking for my Micron pen...

But what's this? Someone has a job for me to do?

Ah, I have a duty to attend to, beg your pardon...

The princess requires her royal tent.

Even though it's already 80 degrees in the house. Fahrenheit, mind.

Back to the drawing. At this stage, I had to move upstairs since my grandmother had come over with her doggo, and he is, perhaps, a bit excitable and therefore not well-suited to tasks requiring focus and fine motor skills. I set up a table upstairs and set about sketching the undersketch for the comic.

I went with scenario B, since it seemed the easiest and my ability to draw dudes standing up is... meh.

Needs work, but I'm getting there on the title card.

Definitely need to work on this to add features, like... faces? and features?
Again, this is a very rough undersketch to let me know where everything belongs.

Cap's face needs to be rounded a bit more, but I'm actually pretty pleased with the
perspective shot here. Yes, it's rough, but I feel like I can see better what I was
going for! This is my favorite panel.

Rough gesture drawing/wireframe for the spit-take!
I've knocked his laptop over, his coffee has spilled, and his hand is gripping the table.
Cap's face will be annoyed when I draw it.

Now, speaking of kitties, as you might imagine, our Princess Puffy Paws (not her name, but who calls cats by their real names?) is not overly fond of excitable gargantuan doggos, so she bolted upstairs when he came in and began whining and barking, as dogs do when they're in strange places and want desperately to sniff and play. She never comes into my room, so when she refused to go into the room where I was drawing, I had to let her come into my actual bedroom, which is where she is still settled, staring nervously at the open door, waiting for him to come in and startle her.

He's been gone for probably half an hour now.

She's giving me a peeved look as I write this. I've told her multiple times that the downstairs is safe again, but I don't think she believes me. I'll have to go downstairs and make a ton of TV racket so she knows it's fine.

Poor kitten. She has no idea what to make of big dogs.

So that's been my day. I hope yours is treating you well!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC