Panda with Gun: The 'WATERSIDE' Comic

I thought this would be good to talk about as it’s my first completed project. So I’ll just ramble about the fun, the trails and the tribulations for a while.

“Yay.” says a sarcastic someone in the back.

So I couple of months back I created a piece of fan art for the ‘Waterside’ project. (Back then it was under the name ‘Powers’) I’d been a follower of Allan Rafferty on YouTube for quite a while, really enjoying and being inspired by all his short films and fan film productions.

I sort of just decided to do something to show how cool I thought the project was going, and as my main talent is art and I thought that would be the easiest thing to produce I created a sketch of a couple of the characters.

The ‘Waterside’ team saw my sketch and I guess they liked it because the next thing I knew I was offered the chance to draw this comic set in the Waterside universe. Well of course I said yes. Anyone would. That sounds awesome.

I’d never done a comic before, well completed one, many first half’s and random pages exist in boxes and folders. And whilst I was fairly confident in my drawing skills there were some things I knew I would need to work on.

Firstly: composition. Having not really done comics I never got much practice in the composition of a page, panel sizes, types of panels all that good stuff. To try and work out each page, experiment with different layouts and such, I created a rough version of the entire book out of little thumbnails. I mainly did this because I’d seen other comic creators use this technique but it did really help. Having worked out my panels and poses before having to worry about making the drawing good I was able to speed up the time I took on each final page.

In the end I wasn't really as experimental with the page layouts as I would have like; I always enjoy wacky layouts and clever use of negative space (see Frank Miller's stuff and the ‘Scott Pilgrim’ books for some really awesome page compositions). But this story ended up having a more basic look.

The second thing I would have to work at was character designs and specifically maintaining character designs from page to page. I often don’t draw a character more than once and when I have in the past they've ended up looking like completely different people with each expression. My solution was character design sheets; carefully drawing a character in as many expressions and profiles I could think of to use as reference every time I drew them. Not tracing, just guidelines to keep the characters look. I don’t know if it’s generally used in comics but I know this is common in animation when multiple animators need to draw the same character in the same way. But I’m so scatter-brained that my style constantly warps and shifts around, meaning me doing a project is almost like having a whole bunch of demented artist.

I’m happy with my character designs and they did help tremendously, however I think it will take a few more projects to stick. The characters did still undergo subtle warps over the course of the story.

Over things I tried to implement were slight changes in characters hairstyles and cloths from day to day to avoid a ‘Scooby-Doo’ look where all the characters are in some sort of time lock, never changing hair or cloths. I also tried to design environments to try and keep the backgrounds consistent and I experimented with using both digital processes and traditional inking for shadows and backgrounds.

A small headache that came into effect on the first page was the speech bubbles. I had planned to just add them digitally like the text but when I got into Photoshop it became apparent that the perfect digital lines wouldn't match the inky line art. The other option would be to just draw the bubbles straight onto the pages as part of the art. It would probably be best to do this on future projects but at this point I was wasn't confident enough to set the bubble placement in stone before I’d typed the text in.

So my weird answer was to draw and ink all the caption boxes and speech bubbles on their own page, scan that in, and then copy and paste them onto the Photoshop page files. This gave the freedom of adding the bubbles digitally but the look of them being drawn.

All in all I’m very happy with the finished product. There are things I wish to improve on in future projects but there isn't really anything I would change about this comic. It was a fantastic script and it was a pleasure and a lot of fun to illustrate it. The ‘Waterside’ project is looking really rather awesome so everyone should check it out.

So that’s all I have to say. “Thank god” cries someone in the back. Hate that guy. See you next time.