Comic Practice-Rough Drafts 1/3!

Comic practice-Rough Drafts 1/3!

I spent my last week of 2022 and first month of 2023 starting my resolution of improving my comic art. I knew I wanted to finish it within January after Henson Co put out their cute “January is for Jareth” thing, and I was like “oh heck yes it is!”

One of the biggest areas I feel I am lacking in is composition/layout, dynamic poses, and pacing. I know the best way to improve on these areas is to keep working on them, and that is best achieved by drawing comics! In order to save myself from burnout, I decided to use a script I could recite from start to finish (songs included!), and therefore Labyrinth was the best choice. This scene in particular was fun to choose because of the fun variance in lighting, creating a great way to practice my values and contrast too!

What really interested me at the end of this was that you can see where I really get into the groove around pg 6 or so. Lines are more confident and the art cleans up a lot. It all still has a way to go before I would count it “print ready” though. The next step would be to go back over these pages and clean the lines up even further, fix anatomy or pose issues (plenty of those in the first couple of pages) and start setting up tones to make more cohesive scenes. By the end of the next step, it’ll be more or less “print ready” in black and white.Critique is more than welcome for these! I’m trying to improve!! One major thing that I can already see bugging me is jareth’s hair changing volume from page to page and definitely work needed on Sarah’s face…like…everywhere. I’m also looking to improve my speech bubbles here. I feel like I’m close, and I like what I did with the different styles for Hoggle, Jareth, and Sarah, but I feel like it’s still not totally “there”. That all being said, I’m pretty proud of myself for cranking out 21~ pages in around a month and around working 40-60 hours a week. I look forward to cleaning these up and making them look even better for my portfolio. I mean, the dream is to do this for a living, and even better if it’s working for Henson Co. I have my work cut out for me! 😄