I think Ariel Olivetti is my new favorite comic book artist. I remember first noticing the stuff he did for X-Man, but never really paid a lot of attention to him until the new Namor series. But I've been experimenting a lot with digitial "penciling" lately, and he's got some pretty good tutorials on his site (in Spanish), and I found a few more on the YouTube:
As always, some stuff will be adjusted and tweaked in the inking stages, but wasn't worth the bother of erasing and re-pencilling.
Additionally, I'm lobbying KVW/Kirk Warren to let me do a weekly art/writing feature for the Weekly Crisis, so I did a little sample image to help sell him on the idea.
I kind of screwed myself on this one, slopping down a bunch of ink as a background since it was late and I was tired, and wanted to finish the pencils and inks before bed. Then I had to try to shape the mess into a decent background, in the coloring/toning stage. You can see the B/W version at my blog.
Manga Studio EX and a small Wacom Bamboo tablet. I'm sure something like Photoshop would be more versatile, and has more custom brushes etc. available, but I prefer MS for how intuitive/user friendly it is. Additionally, the toning options, inking tools, ruler tools, etc. are all pretty nice.
So I was looking at this thread at work and I'll like to throw some concepts out there and see what people think. I'm no skilled writer (Most of these ideas I came up with when I was 15 and now I'm 21...)
Lone Samurai
After Nuclear War wipes out the world, the survivors that lived underground in Vault-like shelters returned to the surface to find a new world changed by war and radiation. The survivors in what was known as New York City soon find themselves under the rule of Maximilian Gomez, the grandson of a drug lord and a genius who's Vault housed a copy of the internet. Using the knowledge he gained, Maximilian creates an army of clones who he uses to keep "Law and Order" over 93% of New York City. Rebellion groups pop up everywhere but many are destroyed almost as quickly as they rise. However, some groups became strong enough to fight back, one being the "Samurai", lead by a man only known as "Master". Master trains young children in the Bushido and sword fighting. The main character is one of these young samurai who's older brother was a samurai too until he was killed during a mission (which is shown in the beginning as a dream of the younger brother.) After waking from the dream of his brother's death, The Samurai is asked to join a group, along with the Master, to take care of some patrols that are dangerously close to the Samurai's secret "Dojo". During the fight with the patrol, a new enemy appears (The Black Ninja), and kills most of the samurai then going head to head with Master. In the fight, the Ninja uses dirty tricks and kills Master, which Samurai sees and in a fit of rage rushes to kill the Ninja. The ninja just knocks the Samurai out. When the Samurai wakes up, the street is filled with the bodies of his friends and the Master is dying. The Master explains to the Samurai that the patrol was a trap and the Government's Army is at the Dojo right now, killing everyone. The Master makes Samurai promise to destroy the government and save the people, then Master dies.
This is the beginning idea. The series will have Samurai (whose name I never wanted to think of or reveal because I thought it would be cooler when I was young) as a young man, between the age or 18-20. The Ninja starts out wielding 1 katana with hidden daggers in his sleeves then will switch for other weapons as he experiments with new styles to find one that suits him. There will be mutants animals, people, robotic Mecha machines and other things mixed in. I plan on making the Samurai sorta heartless at first, narrow-minded and short goal'd. He has no idea how to stop the government nor does he have any allies at first.
I never thought of taking the short stories in my head and putting them together. But if anyone has any ideas or would love to work with me, I'd love to hear it.
Not gonna lie to you, dogg, but right now, your idea seems incredibly generic.
Unless you have amazing ideas for action scenes that soar over the top, you are going to be hard-pressed to tell a story that doesn't feel like it's been told a million times before.
You need a wrinkle, a twist on why we care about this character/story.
Make it a comedy.
Make the main character the antithesis of a stereotypical samurai.
Change the villain from a dang ninja.
It needs something different, something new, something that doesn't make it just a generic smorgasborg of things seen a billion times before.
Right now you basically have Six String Samurai, only without any of the quirks that made it radical.
I do like the idea of a villain who became powerful through access to information.
For a funny twist on the idea, you could make the Samurai and Master inspired not by actual samurai teachings, which have been lost to time in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but by pop culture ephemera. Maybe the only thing Master has to show him what samurai were, is old copies of Blade of the Immortal, Usagi Yojimbo, or Lone Wolf and Cub. Or even something like an old copy of the SNES game, Samurai Showdown.
That makes the conflict a fight between an antagonist who's equipped with cold, hard fact, and a hero who's only armed with stories.
neither of those pages feature a chupacabra detective, munch
why do neither of those pages feature a chupacabra detective?
Because I'm making comic gold over here TLB.
Actually, I really want to get this whole thing in the can before I start El Chupacabra, so I can see the flaws in what I'm doing, as far as leaving enough room for text, panel placement, etc.
I have to agree with TLB about the samurai pitch regarding it needing something different or stylistically distinct about it. While samurai stories and westerns especially tend to tell similar stories and rely a whole lot on the style and pacing of how the pieces fall in place, you should still consider taking some of the usual story elements and twisting them in some way. For example, instead of having the Samurai survive the attack you could have the Master be the sole survivor of the attack. It takes the revenge angle of the story and gives it an extra 'I have nothing else toswordfight anything but only for a short period of time before his heart explodes and you have a hook that adds tension to the usual choppy stuff.
Also, your characters are seemingly built on what they are and not who they are. Take a moment and decide who your characters are in regards to their personalities beyond being a badass sword fighter. live for' and amps it up a bit as the Master just saw his whole life go down the tubes. Couple that with the Master being able to out
I never thought about that, Munch. I thought about it today at work and maybe the Master "learned" the way of the samurai from a comic called "Bushido" that could be about a Samurai who fights against his evil Shogun?
I don't want this to be a comedy as I picture it in my head as a dark, depressing world and the Samurai's life mirroring it. The theme of this is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Maximilian isn't a bad guy, but he's a control freak perfectionist who wants to rebuild New York back to how it was before the Nuclear War but doesn't want people to get in the way with their ideas. The Government does help the people they "enslaved" by giving them food, and using them as worker for projects but he's harsh to those who want to do something outside his dream.
The Samurai and the Master was kinda the same way. They want to see the Government taken down. They want the people to be free. But they have no plans after the fall of the Government. They don't want to rule or lead. The reason I wanted the Samurai to survive and not the Master was that the Master would rebuild his lost forces. Which would make a story in of itself but Samurai isn't a leader. He's been a foot soldier following orders. He has no connection to the people his "protecting" and hasn't seen the good the Government does do. He's a blank slate when it comes to how his character can develop. He isn't so much a "badass sword fighter" as much as he's nothing outside of his "job". That's what I wanted to start from. Build him up from a machine to something human.
Right now, the only "villain" is the Black Ninja. He's the face of the darker side of the Government and Maximilian. I believe he takes pride in his "mastery" of his skills, finds thrills in hunting down the Rebel groups and destroying them. It's all he knows how to do and he does it well. How he will turn out is still in the air. I've never thought of him more than a rival to the Samurai and the evil that the Government has to do to create something good.
Like I said before, most of these ideas are what I came up with when I was 15 and I haven't thought much about them until yesterday when I found this thread.
Honestly, I would move onto a different project. I had several huge projects from my high school years. Yakuza and Triad stories, slice of life vampire ninja stories, super commando stories, all sorts of things. I looked at some of them a few years ago and couldn't really find anything in any of them.
I've been working on this thing off and on for quite a while. Sort of a space picaresque thing starring an AWOL android, the smartest human in the galaxy and a rock star mercenary guy. I write different sketches with these characters, but I never turn anything into scripts
the problem with the things you wrote and found neat or cool in high school is that 99.9999999999999% of the time, they aren't.
and never think about something you would do with a skillset you don't have. ever.
you don't have to take any of my suggestions.
I really don't know what to do with a story like this, it is not a thing I do.
I do, however, know how to make any story better, and, right now, I can't see anything, even as you describe it in greater detail, that really elevates it.
you need to forget the tried and true.
completely and utterly forget it.
write something you wish someone else had made.
not in the sense that you are inferior to that someone else, but in the sense that "this is a thing that should exist. why does it not exist? I will make it exist."
If you can, as objectively as possible, stand back and look at your story and say that, then, and only then should you ever continue.
you shouldn't be able to compare it completely to anything.
you can always notice influences by other works, that is inescapable.
but you should never be able to replace any part of your story with another, established character/setting, and have it truly feel exactly the same.
I'm having a minor debate with myself over this page:
In the final panel should I use A) a normal background with foliage and such.
speed lines
or C) focus lines?
I'm generally not a fan of cheater backgrounds, but I think the speed lines will make a good exclamation point to the end of the page. With either the speed lines or focus lines, I'll also enlarge the little inset reaction shot.
The other option is to do a partial background, which then deteriorates as it meets the focus lines.
A sound effect of something Koala like could be used to fill up the space. Eucafistus!
I may have to steal eucafistus. All my current sound effects are the usual Krak, Smak, etc.
I need to find a way to squeeze in ko-wallop.
It looks like there's no consensus on the speed lines. I may end up doing a dark, heavily inked background, with white speedlines, and see how that looks.
143999Tellin' yanot askin' ya, not pleadin' with yaRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Two days later, but: is the koaladoken finishing a fight/otherwise a one-shot, or is it part of a fight that will continue on the next page? Focus lines might work better to punctuate something like, "BLAM! This hit HARD, and now it's OVER, because KOALADOKEN!" Speed lines might be better to communicate moving into a continuing conflict.
Two days later, but: is the koaladoken finishing a fight/otherwise a one-shot, or is it part of a fight that will continue on the next page? Focus lines might work better to punctuate something like, "BLAM! This hit HARD, and now it's OVER, because KOALADOKEN!" Speed lines might be better to communicate moving into a continuing conflict.
Nah, the fight goes on for two more pages. But, I'm a big believe in the idea that every page should, if possible, have a nice arc, with a beginning, middle, and end, where everything's tied together.
So in this instance, I still want the bottom panel to be, as I said, kind of a big exclamation point, that contrasts with the rest of the page. After thinking about it for a while, what I think I'll do is just render the background/foliage as I normally would, except with very little blacks. So it'll mostly be the thin outlines of plants and such, kind of like how Geoff Darrow or Seth Fisher would draw a background (except worse). That'll offset the the more inked-up characters, and then when I color it, I'll do the background with a big splash of bright colors and stuff, to emphasize the hit.
Thanks for all the opinions and such, too.
Also, I did a banner for a blog I want to start sometime in the next month or so:
I'd originally drawn it to stand vertical, but changed my mind and just plopped it down on its side, and rearranged the lettering. I'm a pretty terrible graphic designer, but it was still fun to do.
I've been thinking about comics again. Has there ever been a comic that used different artists to show different characters' points of view? Say a team-up comic, penciler/artist 1 draws some of the pages from the perspective of character A, while penciler/artist 2 draws some of the pages from the perspective of character B. Has that been attempted before?
Has there ever been a comic with an unreliable narrator, instead of the typical third person omniscient narration?
The prior has been done quite a few times. Most recently in a New Avengers annual. Or anniversary issue, I forget.
No idea on the second, but I wouldnt be surprised. There's the Phantom Stranger's origin where it was four different stories and he never said which was true.
BlankZoe on
0
TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
edited March 2011
To all aspiring creators, don't trace everything and claim you drew covers for Shadow of the Bat that were actually Brian Stelfreeze's and worked on BTAS and forged creators signatures at your comic convention booths.
I never knew you could pay for a table at a convention, I thought they actually looked into whether you were a professional. Silly me.
is very informative. It reminded me that I still need to buy Batman Year 100. Also, Sin City has some amazing stuff in it if you can look past the whores and posturing. I still need to buy a couple volumes of that.
And I now want to write something that begins in media res. Should I finish one of my scripts that start that way, or should I start another one? I have two or three scripts from last summer that start in media res...
Hm. I have an idea for one of my WIP scripts, maybe I will revise it. It is so damn difficult to script things when I can't draw at all. Most comic writers can also draw a little bit, but I can not.
Posts
when you are done drawing it, how much money do you think we gonna make selling it?
I posit all of the money
I just can't wait to see you go into Stan Lee huckster mode.
Tumblr Twitter
Gonna print it up and go to cons and hand it to every pro I can find.
Gonna attack the internet like a tornado on crank lookin' for revenge.
http://www.arielolivetti.com.ar/ingles/index001.html
As always, some stuff will be adjusted and tweaked in the inking stages, but wasn't worth the bother of erasing and re-pencilling.
Additionally, I'm lobbying KVW/Kirk Warren to let me do a weekly art/writing feature for the Weekly Crisis, so I did a little sample image to help sell him on the idea.
I kind of screwed myself on this one, slopping down a bunch of ink as a background since it was late and I was tired, and wanted to finish the pencils and inks before bed. Then I had to try to shape the mess into a decent background, in the coloring/toning stage. You can see the B/W version at my blog.
Tumblr Twitter
Color Scheme Designer's pretty handy for finding colors that work well together.
Tumblr Twitter
why do neither of those pages feature a chupacabra detective?
I demand results
Lone Samurai
After Nuclear War wipes out the world, the survivors that lived underground in Vault-like shelters returned to the surface to find a new world changed by war and radiation. The survivors in what was known as New York City soon find themselves under the rule of Maximilian Gomez, the grandson of a drug lord and a genius who's Vault housed a copy of the internet. Using the knowledge he gained, Maximilian creates an army of clones who he uses to keep "Law and Order" over 93% of New York City. Rebellion groups pop up everywhere but many are destroyed almost as quickly as they rise. However, some groups became strong enough to fight back, one being the "Samurai", lead by a man only known as "Master". Master trains young children in the Bushido and sword fighting. The main character is one of these young samurai who's older brother was a samurai too until he was killed during a mission (which is shown in the beginning as a dream of the younger brother.) After waking from the dream of his brother's death, The Samurai is asked to join a group, along with the Master, to take care of some patrols that are dangerously close to the Samurai's secret "Dojo". During the fight with the patrol, a new enemy appears (The Black Ninja), and kills most of the samurai then going head to head with Master. In the fight, the Ninja uses dirty tricks and kills Master, which Samurai sees and in a fit of rage rushes to kill the Ninja. The ninja just knocks the Samurai out. When the Samurai wakes up, the street is filled with the bodies of his friends and the Master is dying. The Master explains to the Samurai that the patrol was a trap and the Government's Army is at the Dojo right now, killing everyone. The Master makes Samurai promise to destroy the government and save the people, then Master dies.
This is the beginning idea. The series will have Samurai (whose name I never wanted to think of or reveal because I thought it would be cooler when I was young) as a young man, between the age or 18-20. The Ninja starts out wielding 1 katana with hidden daggers in his sleeves then will switch for other weapons as he experiments with new styles to find one that suits him. There will be mutants animals, people, robotic Mecha machines and other things mixed in. I plan on making the Samurai sorta heartless at first, narrow-minded and short goal'd. He has no idea how to stop the government nor does he have any allies at first.
I never thought of taking the short stories in my head and putting them together. But if anyone has any ideas or would love to work with me, I'd love to hear it.
Unless you have amazing ideas for action scenes that soar over the top, you are going to be hard-pressed to tell a story that doesn't feel like it's been told a million times before.
You need a wrinkle, a twist on why we care about this character/story.
Make it a comedy.
Make the main character the antithesis of a stereotypical samurai.
Change the villain from a dang ninja.
It needs something different, something new, something that doesn't make it just a generic smorgasborg of things seen a billion times before.
Right now you basically have Six String Samurai, only without any of the quirks that made it radical.
For a funny twist on the idea, you could make the Samurai and Master inspired not by actual samurai teachings, which have been lost to time in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but by pop culture ephemera. Maybe the only thing Master has to show him what samurai were, is old copies of Blade of the Immortal, Usagi Yojimbo, or Lone Wolf and Cub. Or even something like an old copy of the SNES game, Samurai Showdown.
That makes the conflict a fight between an antagonist who's equipped with cold, hard fact, and a hero who's only armed with stories.
Tumblr Twitter
Actually, I really want to get this whole thing in the can before I start El Chupacabra, so I can see the flaws in what I'm doing, as far as leaving enough room for text, panel placement, etc.
Tumblr Twitter
You're the worst kind of loose cannon
Also, your characters are seemingly built on what they are and not who they are. Take a moment and decide who your characters are in regards to their personalities beyond being a badass sword fighter. live for' and amps it up a bit as the Master just saw his whole life go down the tubes. Couple that with the Master being able to out
Tumblr Twitter
I don't want this to be a comedy as I picture it in my head as a dark, depressing world and the Samurai's life mirroring it. The theme of this is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Maximilian isn't a bad guy, but he's a control freak perfectionist who wants to rebuild New York back to how it was before the Nuclear War but doesn't want people to get in the way with their ideas. The Government does help the people they "enslaved" by giving them food, and using them as worker for projects but he's harsh to those who want to do something outside his dream.
The Samurai and the Master was kinda the same way. They want to see the Government taken down. They want the people to be free. But they have no plans after the fall of the Government. They don't want to rule or lead. The reason I wanted the Samurai to survive and not the Master was that the Master would rebuild his lost forces. Which would make a story in of itself but Samurai isn't a leader. He's been a foot soldier following orders. He has no connection to the people his "protecting" and hasn't seen the good the Government does do. He's a blank slate when it comes to how his character can develop. He isn't so much a "badass sword fighter" as much as he's nothing outside of his "job". That's what I wanted to start from. Build him up from a machine to something human.
Right now, the only "villain" is the Black Ninja. He's the face of the darker side of the Government and Maximilian. I believe he takes pride in his "mastery" of his skills, finds thrills in hunting down the Rebel groups and destroying them. It's all he knows how to do and he does it well. How he will turn out is still in the air. I've never thought of him more than a rival to the Samurai and the evil that the Government has to do to create something good.
Like I said before, most of these ideas are what I came up with when I was 15 and I haven't thought much about them until yesterday when I found this thread.
I've been working on this thing off and on for quite a while. Sort of a space picaresque thing starring an AWOL android, the smartest human in the galaxy and a rock star mercenary guy. I write different sketches with these characters, but I never turn anything into scripts
and never think about something you would do with a skillset you don't have. ever.
you don't have to take any of my suggestions.
I really don't know what to do with a story like this, it is not a thing I do.
I do, however, know how to make any story better, and, right now, I can't see anything, even as you describe it in greater detail, that really elevates it.
you need to forget the tried and true.
completely and utterly forget it.
write something you wish someone else had made.
not in the sense that you are inferior to that someone else, but in the sense that "this is a thing that should exist. why does it not exist? I will make it exist."
If you can, as objectively as possible, stand back and look at your story and say that, then, and only then should you ever continue.
you shouldn't be able to compare it completely to anything.
you can always notice influences by other works, that is inescapable.
but you should never be able to replace any part of your story with another, established character/setting, and have it truly feel exactly the same.
also munch, this is why we are forever bros
In the final panel should I use A) a normal background with foliage and such.
or C) focus lines?
I'm generally not a fan of cheater backgrounds, but I think the speed lines will make a good exclamation point to the end of the page. With either the speed lines or focus lines, I'll also enlarge the little inset reaction shot.
The other option is to do a partial background, which then deteriorates as it meets the focus lines.
I'd be curious to hear some opinions.
Tumblr Twitter
I need to find a way to squeeze in ko-wallop.
It looks like there's no consensus on the speed lines. I may end up doing a dark, heavily inked background, with white speedlines, and see how that looks.
Tumblr Twitter
Winning!
So in this instance, I still want the bottom panel to be, as I said, kind of a big exclamation point, that contrasts with the rest of the page. After thinking about it for a while, what I think I'll do is just render the background/foliage as I normally would, except with very little blacks. So it'll mostly be the thin outlines of plants and such, kind of like how Geoff Darrow or Seth Fisher would draw a background (except worse). That'll offset the the more inked-up characters, and then when I color it, I'll do the background with a big splash of bright colors and stuff, to emphasize the hit.
Thanks for all the opinions and such, too.
Also, I did a banner for a blog I want to start sometime in the next month or so:
I'd originally drawn it to stand vertical, but changed my mind and just plopped it down on its side, and rearranged the lettering. I'm a pretty terrible graphic designer, but it was still fun to do.
Tumblr Twitter
Has there ever been a comic with an unreliable narrator, instead of the typical third person omniscient narration?
No idea on the second, but I wouldnt be surprised. There's the Phantom Stranger's origin where it was four different stories and he never said which was true.
I never knew you could pay for a table at a convention, I thought they actually looked into whether you were a professional. Silly me.
http://consequentialart.wordpress.com/
is very informative. It reminded me that I still need to buy Batman Year 100. Also, Sin City has some amazing stuff in it if you can look past the whores and posturing. I still need to buy a couple volumes of that.
And I now want to write something that begins in media res. Should I finish one of my scripts that start that way, or should I start another one? I have two or three scripts from last summer that start in media res...
Hm. I have an idea for one of my WIP scripts, maybe I will revise it. It is so damn difficult to script things when I can't draw at all. Most comic writers can also draw a little bit, but I can not.
dogg I can't draw for shit
doesn't mean I can't visualize
just write something
stop saying you are going to write something and write something