Back to 224. Wow, its been a long time since this issue came out.
Page 11-
One of the neat things John Workman does with his letters is stick word balloons to the edges of a panel and drop the border out for it. I think its stylish and looks super cool. This page has a lot of great examples of it but my favorite is Sally’s first word balloon in panel 03, it knocks out the whole corner and really helps her to pop out and further highlight her dominance over Geoffrey in the shot.
Bouncing back to panel 01 you’ll see I did the panel as a bleed but it was cropped with a border on the left for the final art. I think the crop looks better especially with the cool location title cut into the top of panel!
This page is also a good example to see that from my pencils to inks the characters get even more roughed up than I had originally envisioned. If you’ve dug out your copy of the issue you’ll see that Sally and Geoffrey’s hair become more frazzled and even their cheek tufts show some wear.
Page 12-
I’m really happy with the second panel. A big quiet shot to tone everything down after all the fighting .
Page 13-
I think my personal favorite background character I’ve drawn is the pink girl in the background of panel 01. I can’t recall if I mentioned this before, but the dog peeking around the pointing guy is a design from Dave Manak in issue 24. I think he was an apple salesman? I draw him in every crowd scene now. He gets all over town.
In panel 03 there I like everything but Nicole’s mouth.
I feel weirded out about doing some references so she doesn’t look exactly right, but in panel 04 down there the girl in the back is, in my mind, Maka from Soul Eater. I remember thinking I should not show the x pattern of her straps otherwise it’ll be perfectly obvious. Now I wish I had, I dont know why I chickened out. And I should have drawn her skirt as a plaid.
Page 14-
I recall having a miserable time trying to figure out panel 01. Sometimes the simplest shots can be the hardest apparently. I really like how it turned out in the end though. In fact, I really like how this whole page turned out. There’s a lot of fun drawing in there.
I dislike Hamlin’s design. He’s a generic cartoon pig, totally lifeless and very un-Sonic to me. Sometimes I have fun sketching out redesigns for characters and I did Hamlin a little while ago. I wanted to include the drawings with this post but I can’t find them. Maybe they’ll surface later.
Page 15-
I frequently find Naugus annoying to draw because he’s almost always doing the same “evil smile” facial expression. Throughout this issue I tried to bump up the range of expressions he would make. I think this page (along with page 16) are good set of different kinds of evil smiles.
Matt Herms colors on Naugus in panel 03 are particularly excellent. You get a real sense of him existing in 3d space and are probably my favorite color in the entire issue.