It's a wrap!

After a month's worth of waiting, the first part of chapter 2 for Remember Babylon is finally done. Pages 1-16 took a massive 100 + hours of work and was completed just a day short of two weeks behind the original deadline. Hurrah.... So as always, "a small and easy" project got bloated into Cyclopean proportions and with me also working on programs for the annual student radio Säteily, staying on schedule turned out to be impossible. In fact my "nicely calculated" spring plan got screwed because I ended up giving this comic more than a week more than I had calculated. But what is done is done, and hopefully I can use this as a "demo", even though the story gets cut short. I've actually played with the idea of trying to sell the story to a publisher. They might even get interested. But here're more production images and as a bonus, the first page of the comic! LTT 3 will hopefully come out in two weeks so stay tuned to see the entire thing and all the great comics by our University's students.

1. Okay, so this is my new profile picture for the introduction page of LTT3. I'm a monkey, tehehehee.

2. Here's the whole thingy, 16 pages, done with a 0,7 and 0,5 mm technical pencils onto basic copy paper. Why the holes you ask? Because this paper was on sale. I counted it took me 3-4 working hours per page. Then begins the inking.

  

3. The inking phase took about the same time as the preliminary penciling even though "I only needed to re-draw the same lines", which of course isn't true. During the penciling phase I leave a lot of details out, because "I'll take care of them during inking". As you can see from the image below, the pencil drawn rocky area is much plainer than the inked one.

4. After inking, there's digitalization and applying the finishing touch in Photoshop. This includes removing mistakes, adding frame borders, dialogue and sound effects and, as in this image, adding shadows to large areas. I'm not sure how pleased I'm with the end results though. We'll see how well the digi-black fits together with the rest of the image when the final print arrives.   

5. Here we have page 1. You can compare my draft from the very beginning

 to the final results. Each page was drafted in the similar fashion so that I could see how the layout works. For this opening page, I first thought to repeat the same sequence as with Chapter 1 (the three growing frames), but it just wouldn't work. Also to give more space for the "evasion frame", I decided to remove one image from "the lizard and the bug"-scene. I'm pretty sure the build up for the evasion is okay even with one image less.

PS. The next time I'll put this much time and effort into a comic, I'll expect something in return. Like a statue. That would be awesome. Or a Lego-set.