Comic Character Sketches

The first chapter of my new webcomic is now complete, and now I have made a start with the second. But now I have hit a problem. The background story is fine and how I want to progress with it. The problem is the artwork itself!

It is the first time I have decided to get into comic drawing. I am a Graphic Designer and artist by profession and only now I have decided to take up a personal interest in creating my own webcomic. To start with I thought it would be quite easy to put it together with the experience in art and design behind me, but how wrong was I?

Don't get me wrong, I love every minute of it. That's when I get the time to fit it in of course. Anyway, the problem I have is the artistic approach to the look of the comic. The first issue I had was whether to create the comic using pencil or ink as the main outlines. I looked at what other people were doing, reading blogs and forums to see what their views were. They were all mixed and I became none the wiser. I think the answer, in the end, was that the look of the comic will only fit how you want it to be.

But then that created more mind games. Was the look of the comic to be very simplified and very cartoon looking? Or maybe more of a graphic novel style of drawing. I think what I am trying to say is that I am still looking for that balance. So I have now made the decision to change the look of the second chapter slightly differently to the first. The story carries on but the art will look a bit different. Personally, I don't think that is a bad thing, as I reckon the art will change with the evolution of the webcomic as I go along.

As you can see in the pictures of this post, I have already made a start with drawing the character of Lian in a slightly different way. I feel a lot happier with this result, though
I know now that the comic will take a lot longer to create. For me, that is not a problem as there is no rush or deadline to meet. I really enjoy the fact that as an artist I'm continually learning all the time. I love the idea of mixing traditional image making such as pencil drawing and then colouring the work in Photoshop. I have never used a Wacom Cintiq or similar, so at the moment my process is a pencil to paper, scanning the artwork and colouring with a mouse on my Mac. It did cross my mind whether to redo the artwork for chapter one, but then I thought it would be nice to see the ongoing progression. 

At the moment I am also working out the characters for the next part and with this have decided to add more shadow work with the pencil rather than relying on all colour in Photoshop. As regards to the colouring, I have looked at the various Marvel, DC comics and love the way some of them just use flat colour instead of rendered looking colours.

I hope this post made sense to you, and as always I'm very open to advice and feedback from other comic artists on the subject. Some of you I am sure have or are still going through the same decision making as I am. I am hoping to get some pages up for the next chapter in February so it will be interesting if I decide to change my mind again on the look of the webcomic.
Right, back to the late night drawing board!You can also click below to catch any Lian updates on,
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