Saturday, May 17, 2008

I Wandered Lonely as a Crowd

I'm still coloring that Elfworld story, but I'm finally working on the last page, which is also the first page. You may remember that the first page is set in a bazaar. There's quite a crowd there.



This makes the job of coloring the thing very complicated. I wish I could say that I'd picked up enough facility with Photoshop to make this sort of thing quick and easy; alas, it looks like this page is going to take me about an hour per panel.

Why, a marketplace like this is enough to give a person agoraphobia! (Sorry. I'm sure Mike would have said it if I hadn't.)

I'll post more of the Matteu story tomorrow, by which time I should actually be finished with these postcards.

2 comments:

Mike said...

Nice! When I see that panel, my heart with pleasure fills...

...mostly because the color makes it easier to spot fun details, like the crazy orange hat worn by the man who's got the little imp on a lead (poor imp!). In the black and white version, my eye tends to just read the whole mass of detail as "crowd" and move along; here, I want to see what everybody looks like. For instance, those two cloaked figures the background on the left: apparently they're members of the same order or something, as they're robed in the same colors and both wearing hoods. That sort of suggestion isn't as available in the black and white.

Also, I like the way you've colored the shield on the Dude with the Chin beside the dwarf. Makes him look kind of like medieval Captain America.

Isaac said...

Believe it or not -- and I suppose you would believe it, since you and I have worked together so much -- I had pretty much all of that in mind when I did the coloring: "medieval Captain America" did cross my mind when coloring that escutcheon; I colored the cloaked figures in the background (almost) the same so that the one facing us could seem to be recognizing the one whose face we can't see.

It doesn't count as "overthinking" if the reader sees it, too, right?