Hi there!
Some time hase passed since my last update and there has been some great progress. First off: The story outline for my comic or rather series of short comics is finished!
While being occupied with other things like work, event planning and my ever returning mental health issues I was unable to work on the story of my comic very much. What I was able to do, was to draw some reference for one of my main characters, which led to me drawing a lot (about 20) different facial expressions of this character for practicing conveying emotions better, which had been a problem before.
After that I explored a little bit the options of how to color my comic and came to the conclusion, that most of the comic will be black & white, since this mode of (not) coloring leads to faster production of pages. Shadows will be handled as simple cel-shading using semitones as well as hints of color values. Special pages or panels will be in full colour though.
The nicest breakthrough with my comic happened just this weekend, where I was able to sit down with my older brother and discuss the story a bit. I already had a good beginning and a fairly decent ending, but my middle part was still an unsolidified mess of ideas for possible events.
The process was quite simple in retrospective: I began telling my brother the story as far as I had it from the beginning and whenever I reached a point of unsolidified ideas or outright plot holes he would ask critical questions and we would discuss possible solutions to the problem at hand. A great help in this whole process was, that my brother at this point was not very well acquainted with the story, so he head an unbiased and uninformed view on the whole construct.
The resulting story outline is shorter than I had expected, but it is in a way the “minimum viable product” to tell the story. Now that the story is more or less defined and in place I can begin drawing storyboards and layouts for the individual pages. As always: nothing is set in stone. I might deviate from the story outline spontaneously during the drawing step, but at least I have a plan with a finite scope.
So much for this update. I hope to keep you updated here and on my art portfolio without spoiling too much of the story.
Keep calm and wash hands.
