Ruth the rebel

An old A3 sketchbook had opened at this page as I'd leant it against a chest of drawers the night before. The original is an inked pencil. I scanned it for this and traced it before simplifying the lines and adding colour. No previous character developing process has made me so excited to keep going and get it right. This is a combination of the upgraded Cintiq, Manga studio and the decision to use colour. I hope to be uploading some scenes outside the scope of the book o'er the next few weeks. If you like this, stay tuned.

This is Ruth in something like the girls' PE uniform (without school logo) from my high school against a vague dry grass and sky background. Her rebellion? Thongs. Make no mistake, she thinks that's a joke, too.

Marty reborn

This is the first fully digital Marty. Rough or not it's the first one that looks like the character in my head.  Flubbed the beach when I ran out of patience as this was only a test. At first he had khaki army pants (typical in the north) but I made them grey as his token attempt at being a punk (or post-punk) in North Queensland, a kind of Factory records touch ;)

From old sketchbook

Marty and Gail on the boat towards the end. Just another colour test, this time with a word balloon.

So .... Colour ....

It happened while I was resurrecting my single panel blog Daily Tablet to get back to drawing every day, break in the new Cintiq tablet and explore the new version of Manga Studio. I looked up some famous birthdays to find a subject but instead drew a woman's face and coloured the lips red. It was an ok doodle but I couldn't take my eyes off the effect of the colour against the black and white of the line drawing. So I did some more.

It haunted me throughout the week and the more I thought of it the more I thought I'd made a mistake in the conception of the novel. I had planned on suggesting the heavy glare of the North Queensland sunlight a character in itself, constraining all the human characters by its power to prevent clear vision. To that end I inked without tone and only minimal hatching or feathering to advance the starkness of the light.

At some point (apart from a series of unexpected obstacles that impeded progress along the way) I looked back at most of the presentation sketches I'd done and felt uncomfortable at their flatness which robbed the lines of a lot of their expression (visible in some cases in the pencil lines left in). So I tried some toning. When you tone you have to make a decision at an early stage on how much you want the tones to suggest depth and how much pen work you want to do the same thing. A combination can work but it has to be carefully done to avoid looking like overbaking. Using only tones in black lines is more common but requires expert use of combination to get where you want. And then if I did that I'd lose the glare.

So, I started looking at photos of the real setting, the pale rust of the sand, the bleached high blue of the sky and the jade grey of the seawater brought everything else back as nothing else had. It brought me back into each frame I experimented with. Soon enough I started seeing the whole story in colour and as I draw to get the characters and hues right I am also doing something I haven't for a while, looking forward to working on The Monsoons.

Gail on Jetty

Getting back to a simpler more cartoony line for the colouring and prefer it.

Progress .. slow but progress all the same...

An early try at Gail on the jetty. She's too old-looking but it was an early one and only a pencil until I traced a scan of it and tried some flat colour. Yes, The Monsoons will now be in colour. It will be flat rather than graded and the shading will probably be in the inking rather by tones. More tests as I progress.

Also, the colours are reminding me more and more of the setting and the time. I never realised they would have that kind of effect, almost like listening to music from the time.