{"id":2494,"date":"2015-01-16T12:36:21","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T18:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/?p=2494"},"modified":"2015-01-17T15:12:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-17T21:12:02","slug":"pro-tip-drawing-nothing-is-very-underrated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/?p=2494","title":{"rendered":"pro tip. drawing nothing is very underrated"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lost in the splash pages and action shots of up and coming comic book illustrators, and (pathetically) some veteran illustrators is the simple idea, that what we are trying to do is capture the imagination of the readers.
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I’m going to reintroduce a phrase here , write it down- “establishing shots”.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is an opening panel or two that tells the reader simple often overlooked things like..where the F*CK<\/em> they are.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

This is important to not only show where the characters are, but where they are in relation to each other, how big the environment is ( i.e. is the room 10×10 feet or 50×50 feet…rather important information to know ESPECIALLY if a fight is going to happen in the room), but also\u00a0 important for setting a mood.\u00a0\u00a0 Backgrounds are your friend.\u00a0 They are your sword and shield when trying to get a reader to get absorbed in a story.\u00a0 A fight is one thing.\u00a0 A fight in an alley is another thing.\u00a0 A fight in a narrow alley is another thing.\u00a0 A fight in a narrow dirty alley filled with clutter is still another.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The last example being the most interesting, and the one that will help make the reader forget he is reading a comic book and feel like he is observing something.\u00a0 So for all you “illustrators” who draw stories of figures existing in some weird wall-less, environmentalists, dimension of “let the colorist deal with the blank space”.\u00a0 You should probably pay attention to this ninja level of using the backgrounds to capture the imagination.
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Here is the opening page to a Cthulhu story (word balloons left off for the sake of this blog) …in which the world has ended before he awoke.\u00a0 OBVIOUSLY ( now that I have explained it to you) the opening shot for a story like this is important.\u00a0\u00a0 Make note of the first three panels and I’ll break down a couple tricks to you.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"TDOF<\/a><\/p>\n

The establishing shot of course needs to be a destroyed city.\u00a0 The temptation here is for the whole tier to just be one wide panel.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\"TDOF<\/a><\/p>\n

That would be okay, but not set up much timing.\u00a0 With one panel, and no word balloons comic out of anyones mouth, you are leaving it up the reader on how long they stay on that panel before moving on.\u00a0 I wanted the mood to be of isolation, barrenness, loneliness even.\u00a0 I want the reader to look around a bit and absorb that the world has ended and there is no one left.\u00a0 So I divided up the on wide shot into three panels.\u00a0 All things being equal, a panel break will make the reader slow down.\u00a0 instead of – look\/ move on-\u00a0\u00a0 it is – look\/stop\/look\/stop\/look move one.\u00a0 They are also subconsciously compelled to look into each panel to see if there is new important visual information. <\/span><\/p>\n

Just dividing it up with some boarders though is a bit boring and not quite good enough.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

What I did here is slide the vanishing point over a little bit with each panel, so it feels like the reader is moving over, turning his head, looking around.\u00a0 Each shot , even though it is of the same skyline, and same height, is from just a bit of a different angle, and this gives a little flow and movement even though nothing is going on.\u00a0 The eye has been drawn in, and led around with nothing but empty buildings.\u00a0 This is a techniques that isn’t obvious but makes a world of difference, between looking at a picture of a skyline and feeling like you are in the city.
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\"TDOF<\/a>Fig.1 the vanishing points on the right. Numbered in correlation to the panels.<\/p>\n

\"TDOF<\/a>fig.2 the left and right vanishing points<\/p>\n

It’s a lot of work for three panels, but when you are trying to capture the imagination…the first few panels are where you succeed or fail.\u00a0 Those panels are the difference between the reading a book or being in another world.\u00a0 And in this particular page they do all the heavy lifting for the rest of the page.\u00a0 Their lack of movement up or down make the panles beneath them more impactful. They are also the reason the last three panels work so well.\u00a0 The reader knows for certain Cthulhu is too late, and is not going to find anyone because the reader already looked around.\u00a0\u00a0 The point and mood I wanted out of the last three panels was not tension of “oh what is he going to find?” but Mopy fruitless query.\u00a0 Without those top three panels some readers may have been wondering what his search would produce instead of ” ha! look at this dope…a day late and a dollar short”
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That’s all for now.<\/span>\u00a0 You may want to follow me on instagram , where I post almost nightly what I am working on and progress from start to finish.\u00a0\u00a0 You can see this page go from pencils to finished inks there.\u00a0 http:\/\/instagram.com\/arsenic_lullaby_official<\/a>
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\"TDOF<\/a><\/p>\n

www.arseniclullabies.com<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lost in the splash pages and action shots of up and coming comic book illustrators, and (pathetically) some veteran illustrators is the simple idea, that what we are trying to do is capture the imagination of the readers. I’m going to reintroduce a phrase here , write it down- “establishing\u2026 Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arseniclullabies.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}