Assignment 4 (WIP)

    This is still a work in progress! As for what is done, most of the dragon/creature line art is final. It may seem sketchy, but I've made this choice to emphasize shading. The frames are finalized, and so are the dialogue/color schemes of each spot. The page closest to completion is the fight scene, and the page furthest from completion is the gemstone cave. The dialogue text is a placeholder and is just my handwriting to know how big to make the bubbles. The font I'm using is going in last to take into account everything else before deciding on a type. The idea I've gone with here is four highlights from the first chapter of a story. Due to the amount of work that goes into drawing everything myself, I knew I couldn't make an entire graphic novel successfully within this time frame. At the same time, I wanted to challenge myself with vastly different kinds of tone and environment. 

    The first challenge I wanted was an incredibly dynamic scene. Fight scenes are pretty dramatic and require a lot of crazy angles that most other settings don't. I did this page last since it took the most planning and practice in the graphic novel format (I've never made a comic before.) I'm also by far the proudest of this one. That being said, I kind of want to go back and redraw some things with what I learned doing the most complicated page. For example, the panel with Percy eating a fruit looks very awkward, and I think I could stand to remake it. The other thing I experimented with a lot is how many panels each page has and how dialogue-heavy they are based on the scene I want to depict. The dialogue scene didn't require a lot of panels but did require a lot of dialogue bubbles. Lots of closeups of faces since the point is talking. 

    The rainforest page is working with establishing shots. I'm not entirely set where this text square should go, but almost in the middle is where it goes for now. I want to get across that these characters live their lives normally and get a feel for what their lives are like. The long panels really worked for this because it gives a sense of fast-paced movement, like a flash between different times of the day. With the fight scene page, I used a diagonal to help insinuate the fast movement of Soot coming to the rescue and have contrasted this with a much larger panel to sort of slow things down when she hits the drake. I kept the dialogue-heavy page very consistent to visually speed up their conversation and give more room for text. The crystal cave is trying to set up a purely visual shot of a new environment. Basically, I'm dabbling in different storytelling types within different scenes to see how these things interact with each other.