Black and White

While I experimented with colour earlier in development I have moved back to a black and white 'woodcut' style illustrated style for the development.


The two real reasons for this decision are my own inspirations and the inspirations of  Lovecraft himself.

My own interests in comics do differ from what I would consider the norm of comics lovers - I do not really like the works of Marvel or DC, and I am generally rather apathetic about the whole superhero genre. I found my inspiration in the comics I enjoyed as a child, mainly 2000AD


A wholly British comic, 2000AD was my main comic to read growing up, my favourites being the mystery related 'Future Shocks' (Self contained stories that were similar to the twilight zone) and more fantastical adventures with moral backing, such as Nemesis the Warlock. These stories were always created with an eye on mood rather than splashing around colour- it was cheaper to print monochrome in the comic's earlier days, and the choice to keep them with their original style stayed through their run, even when colour printing became the norm.

The other side is the illustrators of the time when Lovecraft was alive -several of which he named as inspirations. The woodcut style is something I wished to capture in my work.

Gustave Doré, one of Lovecraft's inspirations

Much more of this artist work can be seen here.

Filters

A recent trial has been into using filters to add mood to the scenes themselves. As these would only require re-rendering scenes (Something that will need to be done anyway) it seemed like a good avenue for experimentation without changing the pipeline of creation.

As usual, Dropbox link -

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tmt3m083o3ui48o/NewTownSceneFilter.mp4

Progress -

Here are some scenes showing progress on the project and further character designs. As the series does start out slow I'm using this time to nail down character designs and keep them consistent.

This is the ticket inspector who first suggests to the main character the possibility of visiting Innsmouth.

As usual the compression on blogger kind of kills the detail, so here's a dropbox link.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o9yh0lsirbleie1/Scene_15.mp4

The main character himself has changed slightly (He only appears in a few frames, and I wasn't sure about the initial ideas of basing upon the look of Lovecraft himself)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u0fte47nrndvzlr/Scene_14_3.mp4

He also lost his hat. I didn't like it.

More XKCD!

XKCD

http://www.xkcd.com/1350/

It seems whenever I write a post about a comic that's inspired me to think outside the box it's XKCD - the stick figure comic based webcomic created by Randall Munroe.

This has to be one of his most interesting experiments yet - earlier I've written about 'Click and Drag' (A comic that let you explore a vast world through a single panel) and 'Time' (A comic that progressed as time did, each panel lost after the first and only kept by other readers saving panels as they progressed) - his latest comic is called 'Lorenz' and allows the user to control and shape the story as they click through, with each panel leading to a new path for the story.

Each reader gets their own story based on their own actions, and new actions are added through the forum by posting to the author directly. When I first viewed this comic the first panel only contained two choices - with a huge variation later - and now it contains four. This is a comic that will grow as it's audience suggests and contract as people subscribe to certain viewpoints.

More Artwork

Detail on an important item in the first chapter - the Tiara that the main character studies. I think it still needs to be tightened up though.

 And the closer to final scene based on the earlier posted image. I think it need contrast beefed up more though

Scene 1, complete. Other scenes are still being worked on to retain this level of quality. If you can't stand the awful Blogger compression head over to my Dropbox for the full version.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath

As his work is in the public domain, Lovecraft's stories have been adapted and re-worked many times before. This is an example of one work I found, and it continues the black and white grainy style that I feel works so well in these horror stories.

Personally I like the styling of this one, but the author's use of panels to help the flow of the story really make it work.

Storyboards