Week 2: Planning

Right now I'm just writing some of the story and designing characters I will be using. Although I am writing the intro, the rest of the project will be majority imagery, so I'm only going to write a loose script for this part so that I have the freedom to experiment with incorporating different topics into the project.

Writing/Script: (Click to read everything I've written so far) Lennox peered over the three-dimensional map on the table in front of him. “Another here, please.” He pointed to the south edge of the city, where the

mountains rose up like unsmiling spectators, ready to watch the city limit be overrun. The silent magician in the corner made a black pillar appear, marking another enemy on the board. Several officers around the room muttered to one another, nervous about the rise in attacks on a boarder they had thought naturally protected...

Lennox is the General and right-hand man to the king with an ambiguous sense of morality.

Lili, Elis's younger sister, amateur moth rider and knight

She rides a Rosy Maple moth named Lucy.

Week 3: Visual Remodeling Exercise

At first I started with the page on the right. I was trying to use the images as references for drawings, but the entire thing felt way too stiff and I was not happy with it. I ended up stopping half-way through and making a color palette for my project using the image of my Narnia books as a starting reference. I tried to make something with more movement and ended up making the drawing on the left. The verb I chose to focus on was "to cut."

Week 3: Progress

I worked on sketching some ideas for moth designs this week, but my main focus was on color palettes. I redesigned some characters and decided on final colors for the main characters I have so far based on a palette of three base colors. I also started scripting the dialogue for the drawings so that next week I'll be able to dive right in to drawing the actual pages.

Script Writing: (click for full text from this week)

*Montage of them getting on the coaster, overlapped conversation:

Adrian: You know that feeling where your stomach flips when you drop from a great height?

*Annelise gives him a strange look but nods

Adrian: That’s you hitting the barrier between our worlds.

Jared: Only you won’t pass through without a little magic. / Hold on!

*fly through to a different dimension, (full page spread?) land on the outskirts of the city, it’s much later in the day, almost evening

*everyone dusts themselves off, Annelise looks around in wonder

Adrian: (looks at Jared) I thought we were going to land inside the castle

Jared: It’s quite difficult to control sir, we’re lucky that we’re inside the city limits.

Right: This is the first pass at a design for the outfits that the magicians, or tailors, wear.

Vivian, or Viv (right), goes by the name Ian Thumros to confuse the enemy as they are trying to search for and capture the leader of the moth riders. Annelise sees Viv in a vision, but only with her helmet on, and accidentally leads the king and his advisors on a wild goose chase.

Week 4: Translating Exercise

I pulled ideas from my original piece on the left to create this little animation on the right. I was trying to capture the feeling of scratchy hair that gets caught in my face as I sleep.

Week 4/5: Progress

This week I wasn't able to do much work for this project unfortunately. I focused on updating some character designs form last week and adding more to the cast of characters, specifically the parents and grandparents of some of the main characters. These are all just the first pass at their designs, so they will probably be changed a bit in the future.

I redesigned the tailor/magician outfits to have a lighter green color scheme (the color combination on the two figures below). All of the magicians at the palace have to wear these uniforms.

Character ideas for some of the other magicians. (left and above)

Annelise's mom has been stuck in the other dimension and works as a magician under the king. Annelise starts having dreams with her mom in them when she goes into that dimension and her powers start to grow. (design above)

Week 6: Progress/Midterm Critique

This week I put together two tester pages lined with full color to get a feel for how the project might look in future stages. They look nice, but they're pretty bland, so I need to think of ways that I want to get more experimental and spice things up. I would have gone back and reworked these pages, but I unfortunately ran out of time this week.

Week 7: Dream Telling Exercise

The green, swirling clouds are what stood out most from my dream, so I recreated them here using pen and ink and colored pencil. I wanted to make them seem almost sinister, which is why I opted for a dark black background and shadows.

Week 7: Progress

I think I'm going to transition to making some little animations for the last part of my project, so I started drawing a room that I want one of my characters to interact with along with some other sketches. I also experimented a little more with some brighter colors and the swirling patterns of moth wings to add some visual interest to my drawings in the future.

Week 8: Riffing Exercise

The comic pages that I created a week or two ago are some of the only "finished" pieces that I've completed in this class so far, and I was pretty proud of the perspective/room I drew in the first page, so I decided to use it for this assignment. I changed the color palette to make the colors less realistic and brighter, and then took inspiration from the drawing that I created for the Visual Remodeling Exercise and added in some halftone effects to create some texture and pattern. I also pulled in the swirling shapes that resembled moth wings a little bit from one of the drawings that I did last week and then changed all of the line art colors so they weren't black. I like the end result much better than the original.

Week 8: Progress

I worked on coloring in the room and solidifying a different color palette based on the creative exercise I did earlier this week. Parts of the image are on different layers to allow for an animated character to interact with the environment. Coloring in the background took a long time, so I am hoping to get started on the animation next week.

The chair and table in the front are each on their own layer so that they can be removed or characters can interact with them.

Testing different room colors in my original sketch.

pulled a new color palette from the drawing on the left

Week 9: Progress

I'm planning on having two final animation pages that go together. One on the left of Annelise in her room in the alternate dimension writing in her notebook and then falling asleep, and then it would transition to the dreamscape animation that I started on the right. I'm going to make it a bit longer and add in more colors and brush strokes to make it more painterly as well.

Most of these animations are still pretty rough and need more frames to make them smoother. (especially the sleeping animation)

Here are some of the frames of the writing animation. I will make more this upcoming week to have her hand move fully across the page of her journal (below).

Week 9: Destruction Exercise

I stabbed the original drawing with a pencil from the front and back and then poured water over it, realized that the original ink I used was waterproof, and then added pen scribbles before going back over it with water. Someone spilled something on it too when I left it out on the table overnight to dry, which is where that yellowish splotch in the top left came from.

Week 10: Final Work

Artist Statement:

I began this quarter with the intention of creating some kind of hybrid comic, building off of previous work from other classes and personal projects to create something new. I worked mainly in procreate on my iPad pro, and I wanted to explore the themes of moths, fantasy vs. reality, knights and armor, and how different mediums can be combined and change how you interact with a story. This process of blending together different ways of storytelling is something that I’ve been interested in for a while now, and I eventually moved away from a hybrid writing and comics combination to a hybrid animation and comics combination.

I really love bright, almost obnoxious color palettes, so figuring out what the right combination of color is for the average person to enjoy has been difficult for me this quarter. I bounced between different color schemes and styles as I experimented in the different comic pages I created throughout the quarter. I had a lot of fun incorporating the halftone effect into my drawings for a spell, but as I incorporated more animations I realized that solid, lineless shapes are the easiest to work with, so my final animations have a much different feel. Moving forward I need to focus on formatting and how I want everything to be combined: if I want mostly typical comic pages with more contained animations, or if I want animations that interact more with the image and move about the page, or a combination of both. With writing and comics it is easier to see the line between the two and combine then in ways that will not truly fit into either category, but with animation and comics it can be a lot trickier to not simply fall into the animation category, so finding the right balance will be key going forward if I want work like this to stick more within the realm of hybrid comics.

*Note: This animation of Annelise sleeping is significantly lower quality than the actual version, but I had to make it smaller to be able to upload it onto this website.