Friday, December 7, 2007

Model Sheet for Ipthorin

So, I'm going to try to work on those pencils for a while tonight, and it occurred to me that I needed to decide what Ipthorin looks like. I haven't heard any strong objections to the dinosaur head, which does explain why Stepan calls him an "old lizard" on p. 1, so I'm going to stick with that.

But I needed to figure out his head shape. Does he have a beak or not? How blunt is his nose?

Moreover, I needed to settle on a wardrobe. We don't see a whole lot of Ipthorin's body in most of these panels, and when we do he's at a decent distance, so I probably could have made things up as I went along, but I wanted to know what I was dealing with.

This first design doesn't quite work. The collar looks silly. Not sure what I was thinking, there, except maybe trying to conjure up some Dr. Strange, or maybe some Elvis.

This is better. Since he's an old man, I like the downward droop of his robe, as if he doesn't really have shoulders. And those squiggles on the front of his robe are meant to evoke magic, serpents, and whatever else Alan Moore has been worshiping lately. Actually, they're just a simple ornament: no sense getting all detailed if we're only going to see Ipthorin drawn very small.

I'm hoping to have more to show you in a day or so.

2 comments:

Mike said...

I also prefer Ipthorin mark 2. The scraggly hair (or hair-like appendages?) marks him as both old and not altogether reptilian as we know it.

Also, judging from "12. Wide Sargasso Sea" and "13. Gemma Bovery," it looks as if you're plotting a syllabus featuring literary revisions, parodies, and "double takes"...not that that has anything to do with our story...

Isaac said...

Those are supposed to be feathers, not hair. Because Ipthorin is a dinosaur, you see. In fact, I'm pretty sure he's a theropod. And some theropods did have the feathers.

(And actually those texts are just at the tail end of the survey course I'm planning.)