Xeno heads and comic advice.

[dracosinfernoweyr]

Lately I've been doodling xeno heads on my notes in class, so I thought I'd show y'all the best of them.



And I also had a question for the folks that have done comics. Recently, my Myth professor said that instead of writing an actual paper for the final, I could turn a myth of my choice into a comic. I'd be interested in this because hey, I happen to enjoy drawing a bit more than I enjoy writing papers.

Only problem is my experience with comic-drawing has been a few hastily done traditional block-styled ones but mostly free-form across a sketchbook page (one called Mel the Homicidal Penguin comes to mind, I'll have to find a page of it and scan it). Can anyone give me some pointers?

Also, I have to decide on a myth to use. I've been thinking about The Theft of Mjolnir, because Thor has been one of my favorite gods, and the idea of drawing him in a dress is very loltastic. Any suggestions on other myths? We've covered Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian, and Germanic myths so far, and will be covering urban legends and recent myths such as Dracula and Frankenstein. I'll appreciate any suggestions or help. :D

[StarFyre]

The one tip I have is, unless you intend to spend days and days and days on this project, solid, pick something short-ish.

I've done some manga-style comics, though I haven't scanned any except the one that's a creation myth for one of my various worlds. Though I'd suggest not going with the right-to-left style that mangas have -- I've found they tend to confuse people ^^;; As some teachers asked to look at the comic I drew, and were like "buh? It doesn't make sense..."

^^;;

As for blocking the comic out, that will take some practice to find the proper flow. Good luck with this.

[Shard]

If you have a quick idea, like SF said, hash it out in typical 9-panel format if it fits that way. but what you could also do perhaps, is a "text on one page art on another" style selection - with one or perhaps two panels of artwork, to accompany the text you've got on the opposite page. That would allow for more detailed art, and if all else fails you'd have the text to fall back on anyway

You could do single-panels and put them together in whatever size you need, also, I know a lot of artists do that now with digital technology. It becomes slightly less easy to control the flow of story that way, but it's cleaner because you can then be absolutely sure of each panel individually.

[Dray]

This is something like what we're doing right now for our narration class...

All I can say is, with whatever story you end up doing, hack out all of the unnecessary info and illustrate only what really -needs- to be shown. Otherwise it takes forEVER to get done. XD Papers are a walk in the park compared to comics!

Rulers are your friends for comic panels, unless you make the conscious decision to have more organic borders. Try to do everything in stages -- get the story written, do thumbnails of the panels, do thumbnails of artwork -in- the panels to make sure they look decent before you get to the final stuff. That way, when you're working on the final, you don't have to think anything through, you're just gettin' er done.