Page 12 and the Big Bang

I’m really happy with the way this one turned out. These wordless pages are always quite a test of my storytelling skills. I think this one came through clearly and conveys all the necessary info. Beyond that, I think I did it with some style!

Surprisingly I did this whole page basically in one evening and the following morning. Let me just comment on the content for a moment. Redemption just tortured poor Arthur for some time to send him over to the bank unwittingly strapped with a bomb, then he blew up the bank and all the money! I think that pretty awesome. Chaos and complexity. The bomb being strapped to Arthur was my idea, originally it was just already in the bank. I think it was a great touch.

So what’s Redemption really all about? He’s got his own reasons for what he does, as you’ll learn more about as the story unfurls.

Let’s talk about the technical aspect of this page. It’s really complex and has a lot of elements. I also redrew some panels several times trying figure out exactly what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.

What did I end up doing? This page is a mixture of pure drawing, photographs, filter effects like blur and paint dabs, burn, dodge, smudge, clone stamp, transformation, transparency, more drawing: all mixed together.

So it was a lot of work. I continue to play with manipulating photos to the point where I try to blend the line between what is photo and what is drawing. I did that much more than ever before here, and pretty much changed the photos until they were boiled down to their essence then built them back up into the way I wanted them to look. I tried other ways of doing this like just drawing everything traditionally based on the photos and what I wanted, tracing certain elements, building initial background shapes based on what I wanted, etc. But in the end I just thought what the hell, I like the photos so I’ll just start with those.

I also really wanted to do something interesting with those top two panels and do an interesting pov shot. The explosion was an interesting thing as well, created with all those Photoshop tools I mentioned earlier. I was going for the initial impact explosion of real life vs the fiery infernos of the movies. Fellow Mythbuster fans should know the difference.

This page let me experiment and story-tell in ways to an extent that I haven’t really gotten to since I drew issue 6. It was fun. Look forward to more, and the start of a fun new scene.