Cartooning: Laying the Foundation

With character models made, I wanted to try and create a set location for a potential comic strip. But I wanted to be smart about it. No point in drawing the same things every single time. Better to create templates I can work with and modify to save time.

So I started with three angles of a table in a room. All the objects in it are separate layers, which can be modified as needed (ie if a pencil has to be picked up, the one currently in front of the character can be easily turned off).

The idea here, however wasn’t to just use these static shots every time, but make it wide enough that I could then zoom in wherever I wanted. To test that out, drew a couple of one-panel comics for each, one at full width, and one or two zoomed in on different characters.

I also finally found an efficient way to add proper text bubbles to the comic, and thanks to some advice from a professional comic letterer, got the bubbles and the text spacing looking more or less right.

So now it’s really kinda looking like a comic!

Also along the way, I learned a more about shading and highlighting. So I feel I’m doing better at adding those details now.

After I finished these, however, I decided to take a break from drawing the Knights and start taking some courses about cartooning in general. Next time, you’ll see how that turns out…