Will we, really?
This is one of the pages that gave me a lot of trouble. Both the big portrait of Mary and the pseudo3d schema explanation of the derive premise. The first part was just due to my ineptness at drawing women, and since I've made it I have recieved several bits of correct criticism about the face and the arm that I'm going to put to good use once I'm done with the comic and move on to fixes and alterations before publication.
The second part was just due to how time-consuming the process was. I actually took a map of the streets of Paris from the internet, distorted it with perspective tool and steadily traced the city block shapes. That was the easy part, though, actually shading and doing the manual emboss on the edges was the difficult (read: boring) part. I have to say that sometimes I wonder if these expansive ideas I get before I start some pages, when realized, make a discernible difference for the reader at the end. I mean, could I have just slapped a vector map of Paris on there - or indeed, any map of any place - and called it a day and nobody would have complained? I wonder about self-impressed notions about what is 'cheap' and what isn't, sometimes.
On the whole, I'm fond on the page but I'll be fonder once I fix the things that need fixing on it, at the end of the journey. The blog is steadily - and scarily - catching up with me, by the way. This is page 16, and I'm on page 22... I hope it doesn't ever completely catch up and I have to draw the page that will go on monday, during the week before it, if for no other reason than how that'd mean I've slacked off for a month and a half somewhere in there...
-Helm
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EDIT: ... but then again it's kinda sad to have a 'read more' link that leads to nothingness, so let's at least have a status report: I'm finishing up page 21. I've sat down and made the overview of the rest of the story. The comic is going to be about 44 pages. So page 22 is the absolute middle. I've gone back to the 'two pages a week, almost' method of working now that the summer is over. This means I'll be done with this in 3 * 4 * 2 = the end of January, which is on-schedule for how I expected things to go.
I also expect I won't keep my schedule of two pages a week ALL the time, and also after I'm done with the whole thing I'm going to take it from the top and do slight alterations and edits on all the pages: some bad font-work, some flat faces and other small things like that (this is where all the feedback you've given me in this blog will be the most useful) so let's say that by the beginning of March this will be done and ready to publish.
I'm going to try to publish it both in Greek and in English, this time, so god help me. At least if all goes well loyal readers and humans who just happen to be non-Greek heathen savages will have the chance to get the artifact version of the story.
I leave you with this concept, in light of the upcoming elections here in Greece: they who align themselves with an ideology completely fashion out of themselves a concept, an idea. And an idea is always something less than human.
-Helm
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That dress is pretty revealing!
And that huge piece of jewelry pretty tacky if you'd see a combo like that in real life, but I think she gets away with it in a black and white comic. Plus, she looks pretty great in that first panel, so full of desire and hope.
He didn't even change clothes.
Rocky panels for a rocky start!
-Helm
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This is a composite trace from a few photographs of down-town Athens, assembled in a way that suited my aims. I mean, the vantage that looks towards the Parthenon doesn't have these exact buildings below it, but these exact buildings are the ones I found most pleasing from my trip to Google Image.
Talking about Google Image, man what a useful thing for artists that need reference. Back before it most serious artists had tons of magazines stacked in a corner, fashion, IKEA catalogs and the like just to have a reference archive. That's probably gone, now, the ever-constant process of digitalization.
This page was really tortuous to draw because I kept feeling like I wasn't making any progress, right up close to when I was almost done with it. Can't explain it very well.
-Helm
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