Anatomy Of A {Part 2}

While not spending my time watching Midget fights online or scaring sexy middle class women into thinking I’m the antichrist I do actually find some time to draw. Last time in ‘Anatomy Of A’ I went through a scene in Dirge where a Police van is driving pass a Kebab shop window. This time I thought I’d go over a scene I’ve mention before in my blog. The image of a young man having to have a traffic cone pulled off that his got stuck on his head while drunk (if any of this stuff starts to turn up in Superman comics I’m suing.) This is how I thought the scene should look when I thumb nailed it.


I wasn’t sure how it would look when I wrote it and was probably the hardest panel on the page to thumbnail but once I had it down on the page I was happy with the rough. When it came time to draw it I knew it was going to be a tough panel. A lot to fit into such a small frame for a start. I was hoping to prove myself wrong and get it down first time, but after a couple of hours I wasn’t happy with what I ended up with. Most of the figures looked awkward, the faces were appalling and the foreshortening on the guys head\traffic cone hadn’t worked or looked half as good as it did in the thumbnail. As I’ve pointed out before my pencil work is usually too faint to scan so I took this picture and brought up the contrast. Hopefully you should be able to make it out. Then again hopefully not. Note the big cross through it. Nothing says wrong like a big angry cross.

I moved on with the page figuring I’d come back to it and try and figure something out. Once I’d had another couple of panels done, I decided to have another go. I had the idea of scanning the tiny thumbnail and blowing it up to the size of the frame. It seemed a bit desperate and I’d never done it before but I thought I’d give it a shot. The thumbnail looked great blown up but lacked slight details that had to be sketched in. All in all it was a lot smoother to draw in then the first time but still a bit of a battle. I think the second frame is a massive improvement on the first and I’m glad I redrew it. It also felt pretty weird working from a blown up thumbnail but I feel it worked out well and might try it again at some point.