Content wise, I pretty much knew what I wanted to put in the book and roughly what layout and composition I wanted for each page. The largest problem was I had no idea what exactly I wanted it to look like. Most of the sketches i'd done were in fineliner, but I knew from doing the mock-up that I didn't want to use that for the final book as it was particularly sloppy and time-consuming to refine
in order to test the widest range of media in the quickest possible manner, I did a series of these little character studies. There was a lot of promise in a lot of them, I really liked the rough line quality that coloured pencil gives and thats probably something i'll definitely use again. I'd never used ink in this manner either, and I was really pleased with the colours that I managed to get out of it - much brighter and saturated than watercolours tend to be! These also tipped me off to the idea of using two seperate colour schemes for both sides of the pages.
(It later turned out that the double-sided printer would only take two types of stock, so I couldn't use the stock I originally planned to use, but it worked out for the better in the end as the matte white paper made it all look a lot cleaner)
These are thumbs for the front and back covers of the book. I wanted these to look definitively like the 'ends' of the book whilst still continuing the narrative that runs inside it. This is something I eventually managed to solve using the colour schemes I worked with.
Whilst I liked a lot of the outcomes of the analogous tests I did my main focus for the book was something that would produce the best, most refined outcome given the timescale I had to make it - which I felt would be difficult to achieve given the amount of refining and cleaning up I would have to do with analogously created pages.
Around this time I started looking really into Luke Pearson's limited colour comic pages, something which I though could potentially really benefit my own pages as it could help separate the two halves of the narrative whilst still keeping it feeling like it it was part of the same thing - as opposed to just doing one side in colour and one side in greyscale.
I was also interested in the way he produced the line work for his work, considering he works heavily with ink and brush/brush nib pens. I lack a high quality ink brush pen, but I do have some nice quality ink and some brushes, so I decided to play about with some mock front covers using it.
The plan for these was to do the inks analogously and then colour it digitally. Again, I got pleasant results from the ink and I think with a bit more practice this technique would be something I would definitely look at using for more of my work. However I figured due to the time constraints I had, It would be quicker simply to do the pages entirely digitally, as I wouldn't have to continuously rock back and forth between sketchbook and photoshop.
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