Jotham's Curse Notes

Done for Megaunity Challenge 2 (Bible Challenge)! This time, what they did was scramble up names of either artists or writers and randomly paired them up. I got paired with a creative guy, Jotham Parker, who wrote the script. What we're told to do was pick a Bible story and draw it out. It could be sci-fi, modern, whatever, as long as the story is consistent with its Biblical counterpart.

Well, they gave us a month and unfortunately I pulled it off for way more than that. They also gave a 'limit' of 8 pages but we also went wacko with that and shot out 19 pages--the longest one submitted. Thank Him that the guys over there over looked this, um, rather--uh--disregard for the specifications and deadline.

Well, this would be a first real shot at inking entirely in manual--save for a few completely black backgrounds or whatever that I don't have the heart to put my marker through. I enjoyed the practice and somewhat faster pace (since there's no "undo" button to slow me down when I make a mistake) and so I've decided to ditch my usage of OpenCanvas as my "ink" for later comics. Which will also explain the visible change in Psychoteers : Chapter 2. Also this would be my first "wide-screen" comic which has a horizontal layout as opposed to the vertical layout I've been doing all my life. That was hard. I've gotten so used to drawing vertical panels, that fit humans better, I choked on so many places since I had no idea how to fit the scene properly. Well, I like the experience anyway.

Probably what I regret most is that I didn't have the ability to keep completely faithful to the original script. Some scenes were just over my level and despite piling 2 megs of reference material from Berenice Abbott's b/w photos of NY in the 1930's (I used one of her photographs in a frame of the first panel in page 1), I still had trouble drawing proper suits/hats/cars and even the tommy guns. It being the first comic I tried with a relatively new style of drawing I also had trouble keeping a constant look on the characters (especially Abimelech and Gaal).

And then there's the factor that I didn't draw the 19 pages in order over that 2 month span.

This, of course, made the characters even more unstable--art wise. You can pretty much tell which pages I did in the early month (the crappy, empty, weird ones) and which I did later (better inking, more backgrounds, more proportional faces). One page that I will definitely remember is page 12.

Page 12 is the last page left I had to do and I spent the remaining 2-3 weeks pouring over it. It's also one of the more break-from-the-original-script pages I did. I didn't know why, but that page was a NIGHTMARE. I couldn't visualize it at all. I drew the panels a couple of times and erased them before starting over. Finally, I just went ahead, bit my tongue, and drew. Hrrr... I hate that page...

That being my most hated page, my favorite page would be page 8--specifically the first panel. I just love how I drew the bramble, hehehehe.

See ya later, brothers and sisters!

- Ann