Consequential Art Practice 2

Finally able to show the summer project work, which I wrote about in august here: http://artofjimfitton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/consequential-art-practice-time-for.html It has dawned on me that I should be showing more of my art since I did after all name this blog "Art of Jim Fitton". Deadline week will be the most obvious time where I can show my work on this site.

So now the main point of this post, I wanted to try and do a scene from 'Night of the Hunter' as a whole noirish manga style comic because I do actually love those comics and wanted to practice and deep my feet into the technical aspects of producing that style of work. I bought one of those How to Draw Manga books by Go Office and Graphic-Sha. One book I now have is 'Enhancing a Character's Sense of Presence'. I have this because black and white print is actually very limiting for an artist to work in, depth can't be acheived through colour and tones will rely on how you do hatching or stippling so this is a good area for me to practice in before I delve into using colour. There are specific tricks to learn so to enhance a figure's presence in such a limiting format and anyone who makes manga and comics like that need to know how best to render and light their figures. Since I was looking at film shots I still had to adapt the photography to what looks best on flat paper.

I didn't rely too much on the book since I prefer to learn by doing but I did find that working with those tones became a deep learning curve. Size of the tone sheets must stay consistent and layering the tone sheets can create a variety of effects, some desired and some not so much for the beginner. After realising this I may aswell buy other books that explore the tone side of this art from the 'How to Draw Manga' range, they tend to have alluring anime women on the covers which even I scoff at. The books that explore the technical side of things are the most informative in my opinion.

I was not going to go too heavy in to this small portion of the summer project by using actual pre manufactured manga tones, instead I downloaded PNG files and worked from my scanned images in photoshop (inked beforehand just like they do in comicbook making). I would like to use the real and tangible thing just to see what I learn but that's one for another day. The tones I got was through the generous users of Deviant Art. I'll be sure to post links on where you can find these tones in the near future.

The things I learned in practice are annotated well in page 28 of the book I bought, local comic shops and Amazon will have them. This here is from Vol 3: Enhancing A Character's Sense of Presence. You can tell immediately how I have made mistakes in my summer project by this photo alone and I have still got plenty to learn and master in this area. A future Consequential Art Practice 3 post? You bet!