Vixen: Typographic Quandaries

Getting down to business and starting the long, long process of actually making pages. I have the first couple penciled and the first page completed entirely.

Click for full size

I spent most of the time spent doing this changing the typeface and size until I was about to kill myself. From a design standpoint I like the script face in context with the Victorian theme...but from a readability standpoint aiehtawoeghawigavj. Type vomit is about the only way to describe my frustration.

Before I throw the script face out the window, I'll need to do print test at actual size and see if it makes a difference. But, if all else fails...I think I may be spending my Saturday night creating my own typeface. It's something I've been meaning to do for awhile (along with move to the moon and befriend all cats) and I think it may be the only way to get the typography right on this sucker since what I'm looking for is so specific.

Also, fucking trees. Why do you have to be so textured? :V

Vixen: Character Sketches

Welp, this week I've finalized the designs for all of the characters that will be appearing in my senior comic, "Vixen." There are two main characters--Lorna and Miss May--and then several minor characters that are infinitely less interesting than the first two.

So here we go. This is Lorna Forester, the protagonist. She has extreme self-consciousness issues and becomes rather susceptible to the lure of the Vixen clan.

And this would be Miss May. Leader of the Vixen clan and general hottie. I have a hard time calling her the antagonist because the story is more complex than simple good vs. evil, but she's the closest to a physical antagonist. She's also the love interest of Lorna. c:

On to the minor characters, who all quite frankly bore me. They have their purposes in the story, but giving them any depth would require taking this to a fat ass graphic novel and that's not what I'm going for. Here we have Lorna's father, William, sister Elizabeth, Clarice, and Henrietta.

Onto concept sketches for the monster hallucinations! This story is very based around reality and fantasy blurring, and at several points, full-blown hallucinations take over in the form of some rather terrifying banshee/werewolf hybrids.

That's it for character sketches! I have the whole thing fully scripted at this point, a schedule all set up for the next three months, and now I'm just struggling with thumbnailing 40 pages at once. Which is what I'm finding the most difficult. I've set my schedule to complete four pages a week, from pencils to finish. I knew trying to get all the pencils done before I started inking wouldn't work, so I'm pacing it out, letting myself do both parts each week rather than doing six weeks of penciling and then six weeks of inking.

Only problem is...I need thumbnails. And I have the same problem with thumbnails as I do pencils. I can't do more than a few thumbnails at once before they start to suck. I'm spoiled by my webcomic schedule where I only have to thumbnail a page before I start it, giving me plenty of time to recharge my page design powers. I might have to see if I can stretch this out as well, seeing as I only have...four pages laid out. Haha oh god and the real work begins.

MCAD Senior Project: "Vixen"

Partially to promote the project, but also to catalogue my storytelling process, I'm going to begin making posts about my senior comic project at MCAD.

THE PROJECT: Create at least 14 full realized, professionally produced comic pages by the end of the semester.
MY PROJECT: Do some crazy shit, make it at least 40 pages long, carry out to print, lesbians.

40 pages seems like a lot, but I work pretty quickly under a deadline, and I always have the summer to finish up any pages since I graduate in December. The way it works at MCAD is that your senior project then becomes your senior show when you graduate. I'm lucky enough to be graduating early, so I get to claim the best wall space and have an extra semester to print and fuss over presentation.

So, once upon a time I was a silly art school kid who thought that she could finish up the first 200 page volume of her webcomic and take up ALL THE WALL SPACE and it would be amazing. But she had too many credits and was too neurotic and ended up shifting her senior project to a whole year before she had planned to do it. So she didn't have a story until two weeks ago when she doodled a naked lady with a fox mask.

Initial "Vixen" sketch

The story came after. I had been drawing random characters with different kinds of taxidermy as masks/heads for the past few weeks, so when I did this, I hadn't thought much about it. But it sparked an idea of a "vixen" who was morbidly obsessed with beauty and slaughtered her victims in a forest. And then, as is so typical of me, I felt the urge to turn it into yet another story that blurs fantasy and reality fueled by sociopathy. Refer to "The Lament of Miss Tidbits" that I did in the winter.

Final page of "The Lament of Miss Tidbits"

So this past week I've been fleshing out the story, getting a script down, character designs, all that jazz. I've also spent a good amount of time thinking of what this story means. Hot, gory lesbian scenes and crazy fox masks are quite nice and all, but since I kind of came up with this story on the spot I've really had to work through developing the underlying messages. In this process, I think I've unearthed old personal issues that I had actually forgotten existed.

Long ago, in the dark ages of high school, I was a dancer. A fucking ballerina at that. It was fun and I loved it, don't get me wrong, but the pressure of maintaining that "ballerina" physique was enormous. It didn't affect me too much personally, but I saw it all around me. At every recital at least a quarter of the girls would have meltdowns because classmates, teachers, hell, even mothers would judge them for not fitting into the costume right. It was sickening.

I guess "Vixen" (I guess that's what I'm calling it at this point.) represents the sickness of modern body image by idolizing beauty in a sociopathic way. Yes, I am aware that I sound like I'm full of it. Maybe I am. But there are lesbians! YAY LESBIANS.

Here is one of them now.

"Vixen" Promo

And now, after all of my rambling of meaning and concept, I present you with an unofficial synopsis of the story:

In a town in nineteenth century England, girls are going missing. Some say it's a mad man; others say it's a pack of wolves. No one knows but Lorna, who accidentally finds the criminals behind the abductions--the Vixen clan of the forest. The clan gives her a choice: be ruthlessly cannibalized, or join them and become one of the beautiful, bloodthirsty Vixen. Can Lorna make the transformation into the clan, or will she be too repulsed by the true nature of the Vixen?

Character designs and other process work to come! I hope everyone looks forward to this story as much as I do. c:

(Also, feedback and critique is more than welcomed. I'm getting good feedback from school, but I'd like to hear a broader, perhaps more reader-based view as well. c: )

Sketches. Sketches, forever.

In an attempt to try to update this more often, I'm going to start sharing some drawings from my sketchbooks and other various places.


I drew people I saw from the last hour of my second shift at the aquarium last night on a feeding schedule.


Salome from my webcomic, GHOST! From my comic sketchbook/notebook from school. The discussion had tangent-ed into Harry Potter debate at that point haha.


Grave from GHOST! again trying to be a badass but failing.


Grave in Halloween garb because I don't know.


Uhm. :D


Lol character design of a superhero/boyslove comic I've been concepting. HE CONTROLS THE POWER OF THE STARSSSHURP. *sogay*


Rough sketch for a repeating pattern project for school. Of course I'm going overboard as usual. :I

Anddd that's it for now. I have literally an asston of sketches and process pages that just sit here, so if you like seeing this stuff and want to see more of it, let me know. c:

The best way to become a better comic artist is to make comics.

This week was my first week back to school at ye old MCAD. Taking WAY too many classes and gonna die, but I'm excited to be back.

BUT.
The one thing I absolutely can't STAND about starting a new year is introductions. You'd think as juniors, this kind of thing would be unnecessary. WRONG. And the thing that happens EVERY. YEAR. is that I get asked:

"So what was the last comic you read that totally like, BLEW YER MIND?"

MOTHERFUCKER.
I NEVER have an answer for this because HEY I DON'T READ COMICS I MAKE THEM. I usually have to fumble for an excuse and say, "Well I'm more of a novel reader I guess," and then I have to poorly pronounce the last Russian novel I read. :I It just makes me sound like an asshole/retard.

I am taking a screenwriting class as well. Before the teacher told us the story of how he stole the original script of Last Action Hero, he said "The best way to become a better writer is to write. The second best way to become a writer is to read."

So, you'd think this would apply to comics. Reading comics certainly can teach you a thing or two, but it is nowhere near as effective as making them and learning from personal mistakes and triumphs. I hardly read comics on my own time. It's not that I dislike them, but I would chose the chance to make a comic over reading a comic any day.

I mean, this is why I was the only person in my comic publishing class that had actually published any of their work. (Another awkward introduction where I sound like a pretentious asshole.)

Why settle for a secondary learning method when you can have a first hand experience that actually moves you forward?

Doing that in that dress would get real old real fast.

While trying to figure out how I'm going tag GHOST! updates when I tweet about them, I started pondering how webcomic artists abuse the advantage of social networking, on-demand search engines, rss feeds, etc. I mean, we're all up in that shit. I mean, the whole point of WEBcomics is that they're on the WEB. You don't have to leave your house.

Then I tried imagining myself trying to be a solo comic artist in 17th century England, but not having the connections or decency to go through proper channels like newspapers so I'd just do this:



I call it barking. (HA.)

Thank god for the internet sometimes because doing that in that dress would get real old real fast.

Bleed Margin Paranoia

This will be more of an informative post than anything else just because this shit is important, but no one knows about the horror of...


Despite the dramatics, this shit is relatively unknown to most beginning comic artists. At least it was to me. I had one hell of a time trying to print Acid Monday because I wanted the images to bleed off the page, but I didn't have enough room to safely do that. It was a long process of resizing images and going back and forth with the printer to get it done, but it could have all been avoided had I known about the process of getting full bleed comics printed.

The standard work size for comics lately seems to be 10"x15". It's reduced down to 6"x9" for print (in America at least). However, that doesn't mean you have to keep to that size. If you want to go to the 10"x14"/5"x7" manga size, go ahead. If you want to take creative control and do an unusual size, knock your socks off. Just keep in mind that it will be more expensive to print. Since I work in the traditional American size, I'll be using that as my example, but the same rules should carry over to other sizes.

So, I start with a 10"x15" page with an additional 1/2" bleed margin on all sides, making the final size 11"x16". Here's an example of what one of my GHOST! pages looks like with the bleed margin marked off:

Note that this is a screen shot from Manga Studio, and I added in the color in photoshop to better show the bleed margin. You can create rulers in photoshop like this as well, it's just more difficult. :)

The bleed margin is basically giving the printers room for your comic to be trimmed. When perfect binding a book, it is necessary to do a final trim of the pages so it is perfectly aligned. But, in the process of binding, pages tend to move over a little, and if there is no extra image on the pages, the pages may have an unseemly white border.

BUT. There's more. See, when the bleed margin is cut off, the composition of the page changes slightly. Which is where I'd like to introduce the what is called the "live area". I work with a 9"x14" live area, so it's another 1/2" margin away from the bleed margin, depicted below in orange:

Basically, all the important shit (faces, text, etc.) should stay within an area that has not been colorized. If you cross the live area margin, it's not a huge deal since that area is mostly for compositional compensation anyways, but crossing the bleed margin SHOULD NOT happen. Otherwise you'll get cut off faces and text.

That's all for now! I hope this was somewhat helpful and not just terrifying, because when I think about bleed margins I shake and my palms start to sweat. :o