2AM Blues

Another late-night paint sketch that started with throwing down some random brush strokes and seeing what emerged. It's a fun and spontaneous exercise.


Us humans are a narcissistic breed. We tend to see our likeness in the most abstract shapes (take Scott McCloud's example in Understanding Comics, a smiley for instance :) ), so it's probably not too surprising that it ended up looking that way to me and I reinforced what I thought I saw.


This dude was the end result. With this cropping I thought it looked a bit like a CD jacket.

The progress shot shows that the painting was started in the template I use for my work on Twelfth Night. I've been thumbnailing for the last few days. It's probably the most challenging and creatively demanding step in the comic creation process for me, but that also makes it the most rewarding. If the underlying structure is boring every step in the process to follow, from pencilling to inking to toning, will feel like a drag because I know that the page will be lacking no matter what.

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Scott McCloud: scottmccloud.com
Understanding Comics: Amazon - Mandatory reading for any comic fan

Tezuka's Paneling

Osamu Tezuka is often hailed as the God of manga. It's taken me a good while to start reading his work but so far I've been pleasantly surprised. As old as these things are, the stories are still relevant and they read pretty well. It's easy to see why they changed the face of manga back then.

Tezuka is known for being pretty experimental for his time. Recently I've been reading his Ode to Kirihito. Most of the book has a very clear panel layout and narrative but these two pages stood out a bit. Nowadays this type of irregular panelling would hardly raise a brow, but I wonder if it would have been perceived as pretty out there back when it was published in the 70's.

The question is how effective this kind of jigsaw type of panelling is. I find myself struggling to figure out in what order the panels are supposed to be read. It could be argued that since these panels are used in a collage fashion to give you a visual blast, it doesn't really matter. As interesting as it may look, the fact that you have to stop and think about how to read it defeats the purpose to me.
It could be that the purpose of the creator is to generate a sense of psychological unease, in which case I think this type of paneling would work pretty well, but having read these two pages in context, neither warrants large amount of unease.

It can be a challenge to balance between interesting page layouts and readability. Paul Duffield and Kate Brown did great jobs on this for SelfMadeHero's Manga Shakespeare line - their titles are The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream respectively.


Being Shakespeare, the beautiful and often abstract page layouts compliment the poetical language. At the same time, the narrative is kept flowing steadily so the reader can immerse themselves in the story.
(And for the record, I'm not just saying this just because I happen to be working on a title of my own.)

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Paul Duffield - spoonbard
Kate Brown @ Deviantart
Manga Shakespeare - SelfMadeHero

Twelfth Night for SelfMadeHero

Since October, and for the next couple of months onwards, I've been working full time on the graphic novel adaptation of Shakespear's Twelfth Night for SelfMadeHero's Manga Shakespeare line. It will end up as 193 black & white comic pages and 9 coloured character pages. The colour pages are already done and I'm working on the first batch of pages from the abridged script. Sadly I can't show any work in progress at the moment but the cover and some information about the title has been released on SelfMadeHero's website.


Fast food chains, sale labels, road signs - things that are designed to steal your attention tend use the primary colours, red, blue and yellow. I decided to apply similar reasoning for my cover design. Each character is dominated by a primary, but it's not quite as eye-catching as say, a Burger King sign.


The composition is simple but I hoped that it would read more easily this way.
There were about 10 alternative cover thumbnails of varying complexity, but in the end it was the very first one that I drew that got chosen. Perhaps that says something about that first intuitive idea you have when given a new assignment.
For the same reason I find it very difficult to keep my comic page thumbnails rough. The strongest imagery come from the first time I immerse myself in the a script, so I tend to put down little details before I forget them. On one hand it's good in that the first impression is preserved but on the other hand it makes me more reluctant to scrap things and start over from scratch, which is needed sometimes.

Impact panel

An impact panel should convey a strong sense of action. To this end, speed lines are used often, but there are other ways to make a panel more dynamic.

This is the original hand-inked panel for an impact panel I drew recently.
Curved speed lines have been drawn to show the direction of the action of the hand and small explosion-like lines have been drawn around the area of impact. A big sound effect conveys the strength of the impact.
Small pieces of debris have been added as extra dynamic elements. A common trick when drawing impact and action panels is to arrange pieces of debris or other flying elements in a way that follows the direction of the action in the panel. Here the debris originates from the punch, so the direction of action is outwards from the hand.


While there is a sense of impact is present in the original inks, I further improvements were made digitally. Focus lines were added in Manga Studio and more pieces of debris were drawn long the direction of the focus lines.
For those who are interested in small details, in the original inks a piece of debris has one square side perpendicular to the impact lines (the big one underneath the 'A'). I felt that instead of helping the action, the perpendicular side hemmed the flow, so I changed the shape of the debris in the panel below.

A big thing that needed more work was the sound effect. A simple outline is neither particularly dynamic nor contains any weight or impact, so it needed to be filled. Instead of using solid black I chose to once again follow the focus lines of the panel, making the sound effect a part of the action.