24 Hour Comic

To finish out this past week, I participated in contributing a page to Kayfam's 24-hour comic jam book "Otaku No Gaijin." The book is a tribute to Japanese OVA's (Original Video Animation--basically direct to video) of the 80's and 90's. Each participating artist had to select an OVA from the provided list and create a page dedicated to it. The OVA I chose was Megazone 23. I'd never seen it before, so the first thing I did was watch the movie. Its free on either Tubi or Youtube. I did some sketching and made notes and took some screenshots as I watched. A line of dialog from the movie stuck out that I used as the basis for my page. However I did not follow instructions because the page wasn't supposed to have any words on it. But I was able to easily remedy that by digitally removing them and placing the panels on their own layers so that the design team could lay it out how they needed.

After penciling the page, I used the lighbox to ink onto a separate piece of watercolor paper. The reason I did this was because I was inking using my Pilot Prera fountain pen, and while the Platinum Carbon Ink holds up well to watercolors, I'm not sure how well it would do to me vigorously erasing pencils underneath it. After inking the page, I applied watercolors overtop, referencing my screenshots and simplifying the color compositions as much as possible. If you're interested,I documented the entire inking and watercolor process on two separate YouTube LiveStreams you can see below. I'm incredibly pleased with not only the process but also the final product. I have been wanting to make a comic using the fountain pen for the longest time, and getting finally getting ink that I am able to watercolor over has gotten me to that point. I'm excited about the possibilities.