Sunday, September 16, 2007

Page 4, inked

Okay. Here's the inked version of page 4. I wound up cross-hatching a lot on this one, maybe more than I ought to have. I wanted to make the shop (and the alley) look a little gloomy. Plus, cross-hatching was one way to make the signs drop into the background even on the black-and-white version of the story. (You'll notice that I also broke the letterforms a lot, which will hopefully make the signs read less like captions or speech balloons, even though they're mostly in my lettering hand.)

Notable changes from the pencils are few (except for the shading): mostly I just firmed up a few places where I'd left the pencils a little loose. I made one mistake with the orientation of Kalbi's dewclaw (in panel 3) and had to erase the mistake in Photoshop. Hopefully that's not noticeable.

You can, as usual, see a bigger version of this if you click on it:


That bigger version will appear at larger-than-postcard size, but believe me that it has 70% of the information (pixels) that the actual postcard will have—so it ought to be a good gauge of legibility, even at a slightly larger size.

Now let's see where Mike goes with page five!
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4 comments:

  1. MikeSeptember 16, 2007 at 1:22 PM

    Nice page, Isaac! It looks good in black and white, I think, and it'll be fun to see in color. I like the signage, the names of the shops, and the kind of work implied by Inner Eye Impossible Cartography. I also like John's design and the cliffhanger ending; Kalbi looks pretty alarmed there. Wonder why?...

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  2. IsaacSeptember 16, 2007 at 2:34 PM

    Do you think the space (shelves, and so forth) on the inside of Inner Eye is clear?

    One thing that I realized after getting pretty far in the drawing, though clearly before I posted the pencils: putting a bell and a little sign on that counter helps to make a lot of the spatial relations clearer, by making it obvious that the counter in panels 6 and 8 is the same counter in panels 3 and 10.

    Let's hope you can get the action out of the shop on p. 5, Mike. I'm tired of drawing those signs, and this isn't supposed to be a submission for "Shelfworld"!

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  3. MikeSeptember 16, 2007 at 3:37 PM

    Heh! Fear not, compadre...getting out of the shop is a must. I have other mysteries to solve, too, but that's my narrative priority.

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  4. MattSeptember 17, 2007 at 4:51 PM

    I love the signage as well. My favorite thing, though, is that little service bell that, in the penultimate panel, very nearly "goes off" (in the sense of Chekhov's Act One gun).

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