Pages 1 and 2

What I really wanted to work on here was my use of pens. Not something I’ve spent enough time with recently or ever. So to get round this, the exercise here was simply get experience in (fibre tip) pen work.

Materials and tools:

Pens – Various pens from fat markers to .05 graphic pens.
Standard A4 printer paper
Lightbox
Found images
Scanner and Computer

This opening part is like a historical re-cap of what as happened prior to our story. I wanted the images and tone to be, therefore, almost news like, or like a film describing a part of history. To achieve the desired feel, I worked very closely with found photographs to try and get a realistic feel. This encourages the reader accept the (somewhat preposterous) parameters of the story as being viable and real. I also wanted to see how I could describe the shading and tonal qualities of a photo in a different way through the density and shape of pen lines. So monochromatically and graphical rather than photo exact and shaded. Also, to add drama, new emphasis was created by moving lines in different ways. For example, see the ladies eyes in panel 3 on page 1.

The earth, and it’s black scarring are a composite of found images.

The colouring and texture details are a mixture of various layers of ink splats and ink paintings that I did (the ink comes back into it in a few pages time). These were scanned in and composited and coloured. While I worked hard to make the images exact and related to photo, I wanted the colour and backgrounds to be chaotic and full of fire, as an expression of the story, and also to complete the images in a fairly logical way.