Beauty and the Beast/ BUTTON PHOBIA

Hey Guys, for my Beauty and the Beast project I had more than one story I would like to tell. The first idea was about the hairiest man alive, suffering in a circus. He gets saved by a kind clown woman. I will continue with the freak show idea when i'm done with the button phobia one.

For those of you who haven't been to the meetings, I thought of things that could be the beast, so I thought about a documentary I saw about strange phobias. One of them was button phobia which really effected people in their daily lifes.  They screamed, jumped up and down and started crying because of buttons. The phobia is the beast!

My story is about a woman that is terrified of buttons and I tell how her phobia developed.
I started all over again with my character design and focused on facial expressions. Also what expressive traits each character will have and which style suits my story. (Scott Mc Cloud's Making Comics)

I did some research for my character. the button phobia woman is either disgusted, or absolutly horrified of buttons.  Fotos by Hitchcocks films helped me to work on the facial expressions.

Marijpol inspired me for the style. She uses strong contrast through her shadings. (The shadings follow the object or the figure which creates dynamic). 

As you can see above I used strong shadings for my story. The character itself was way too "cartoony" so I changed to a more realistic style. Still I felt like something was missing and I disliked the neat and stiff look of my character. To break out of my comfort zone I continued to work with pencil. I haven't done anything in pencil in ages, but figured it will help me to get more lose and create a different style. The artist below uses pencil for his story. Also the unusual style for a graphic novel inspires me a lot.

I kept the hair in strict lines which is another contrast in style. It also stands for her compulsive way/ fear of buttons.

I will post more this week. Don't want to bomb you with my work. Thanks for your time and I'm always thankful for feedback.

Mmmmm pretty..

nice elegant storytelling and art work by Sarah Mensinga

thought peeps might enjoy

always find this site useful, thought i'd share

http://meathaus.com/

Help! - i need contacts / my new portfolio

Hey guys,

I am looking for professional contacts (writers, Illustrators, and publishers/ editors) to send out my beauty & the beast pages to.

I am struggling to build a good list of contacts, though i have a few, I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts and tips on finding contacts? any good resources for finding email/ post addresses, or even just names that i can start from?

Maybe it would be good to do some of this as a group? maybe build a shared database/ list of contacts? Dunno if peeps are precious about sharing this stuff?

On a separate note i have finally sorted out a couple of online portfolios, only on carbonmade and behance but its a start! There is a set of recent commissioned corporate/editorial pieces i did a couple of weeks ago on there. Would love some feedback on the portfolio - Not sure if it is too varied/ not specialist enough?

Cheers folks :)

Observer Cape Graphic Short Story Prize

I sketched these out for the Observer comp, having hit a bit of a wall with the Beauty and the Beast project, and actually like these more... So much so i'm tempted to work in another page and use it for the Beauty and the Beast brief.

They're a bit sketchy, didn't really want to devote too much time to it, and i'm already looking at better producing some frames, or sourcing reference for certain poses in certain frames.

Beauty and the Beast

Hey here's a concept illustration for Beauty and the Beast done using black ink and tippex and watercolour.

Enjoy!

Beauty and the Beast

This is really unique must have taken some intricate cutting skills and unfortunately the original book is destroyed but it looks really interesting.

http://talesoffaerie.blogspot.com/2011/07/beauty-and-beast-altered-book.html

Clint Magazine & inspiration

http://titanmagazines.com/t/clint/features/announcements/see-your-work-clint/

Check out clint magazine - run by folks like Joe Cornish (of Adam & Joe fame) and Mark Millar, calling for comic artists -

Magazine very much in the spotlight featuring stuff from Jimmy Carr and Jonathan Ross amongst many more 'real' comic artists.

also this vid/advert is really cool

thought this was really cool and need to share

i felt really inspired by this

http://emcarroll.com/comics/prince/andthesea.html

Beauty & the beast - finished(ish)

Howdy y'all

Here are my five pages for Beauty & the Beast.

They are 'finished' but I am still keen to tidy it up and make improvements - especially on the text, both actual dialogue and visual presentation.

Thoughts & comments please

characters and colour

Started drawing stuff and generating ideas, these are a few of the initial ideas and experiments. I will move on to developing a more refined narrative. Im unsure of what approach to take and would appreciate some constructive criticism/feed back.     

Creating Worlds

I've been focusing on the 'World Building' chapter of Making Comics as my environments are very lazy, but also trying to work on my making my characters more expressive, compositions more interesting and generally working on a more professional aesthetic.

Here's my (very) rough storyboard:

There are three environments in the story; The bar, the desert and the cave all of which I will work on before creating the final pages.

As for the mountains I like the one with the holes best, inspired by Moebius and Max Ernst who I'll look at in more detail when drawing them all proper like.

Pencil study for the cave:

And a pen one which I much prefer:

Finally I got a bit sidetracked by a painting of the bar scene, still not quite finished but you get the gist:

I stand by the fact that this was useful for refining the seedy bar characters and the environment of the bar itself, but it would be extremely time consuming to paint every panel in this way...

Rules are made to be broken

I found this in a Milo Manara story...who says speech bubbles can't interact with characters? Haha

Short Graphic novel competition

http://www.vintage-books.co.uk/about-us/jonathan-cape/Graphicshortstoryprize/

FYI

Pages 1 and 2

Pretty much final, but obviously there's always plenty of room for improvement. I don't really know if I'm happy with them or not. The story is still a bit incomprehensible at this point. The Beast is the misunderstandings between a couple basically, and in this world it's turning the guy into a "beast" (he looks a little more beastly as it goes along and as he falls in his misunderstandings more and more) while the Beauty (always the saviour in this fairytale) is trying to bring him back down to earth. I tried keeping a few elements of the original fairytale - the "Beast" in the castle, the rose (although that's a lilly) under the glass case, etc. Also I stuck to handwritten text, slanting it when she's talking just so they look a little different, it's definitely not a very high standard of lettering but I think I prefer it to computer fonts... Aaanyway, let me know what you think while I crack on with the rest of the pages :)
(ah also my scanner is not very good, but I'll photocopy them as soon as I get the  chance so they'll look nice and smooth)

Visuals by Sound

Have started to record my progress of drawing using my diverse range of music as a guideline for future creative ideas this rough wacom tablet drawing is inspired by the sound track to rockstars L.A Noire composed by Andrew Hale.

 link to video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz6ze_b31oo&feature=channel_video_title

I will continue this series as a development for ideas and to show my rough work in motion. 

If anyone knows of a better free screen recorder please tell me so that stupid watermark dose not interferer with the viewing. 

Channel http://www.youtube.com/user/Jowybean 

hey guys

i need some help please!

i need to figure out whether to use colours to fill outlines like this..

or keep all lines black like this...

or to completely go against everything i believe in and combine the two?

this is bells father by the way. i've decided against the normal 18th century dress, i've done it so often and i just wanted to draw a completely different era. so this is pre ww1. it's a pilots outfit. mmmmhmm

and i know it's really scrappy and badly coloured and whatever, but it's just a draft until i figure out the best way to do the silly outlines!

Welcome to my world for the moment

Its been a while since I posted anything on ink soup but this is to generally give you an idea of exactly what sort of world and style I am going with for my practice. I want to have a blend of realistic environments people and situations contested by cartoon elements and characters. Essentially a Roger Rabbit sort of universe with the distorted architecture of Cool world but each area will be different to the last.

This is a rough digital drawing I did combining elements of the secondary photograph (I will try and do my own for the projects) with the characterized objects and figures in the composition this also will help in my colour theory which is why photography will help make this style more practical and accurate.

Concept for devil character

New direction for the devil character, think this is much better than the cartoony version i had in the draft?

I think i like the original pencil sketch i did of this better than the finished version. ho hum!

Beauty & the Beast final draft

Hey guys,

In the spirit of community critique and all that jazz here is the final draft of my piece for Beauty & the Beast.

The drawing is pretty rough as I was concentrating on getting the narrative pace, plot clarity, frame comp, etc rather than the aesthetic.

I am pretty happy with it so far, Couple of things I will change - firstly on page 2 the top two frames , Firstly frame 2 is not clear enough - it is supposed to be the candles flaring and filling the room with smoke, secondly i dont think it is clear that the boy is causing the candles to flair - there is not a strong causal link (i was thinking of having the boy clicking his fingers?)

From here I plan to develop the aesthetic with particular focus on characterisation - I want to make the priest more creepy looking (i was thinking hook nose and pointy chin like the old punch & judy puppets) The boy needs to be cuter and more innocent at the start to emphasise the transition and major one is the devil as he is massively cheesy!

Anyway - THIS IS HERE FOR CRIT!!! please don't just tell me it's nice! constructive feedback please.

Panna a netvor.

The Czech version of "Beauty and the Beast" - dark, poetic, and subtitled. It's all on youtube if you're patient enough to click on the next part every ten minutes or so :)