Here's a sneak preview of a couple of comics I'm working on at the moment. Above is a page from a new April, May & June adventure which is not long underway. The comic opens with the three gals beating/getting beaten the snot out of each other. Just the way they pass the time between capers. The story - such as it is - will then progress to having our heroines take on a variety of different jobs and fail spectauclarly (and hopefully, comedically) at all of them.
This page was drawn slightly differently than the bulk of my traditonal comic work in that I drew the trippy backgrounds seperately instead as of part of the frame. The area behind the characters was left blank and uncoloured. After scanning into Phototshop, I used the layer tool to put the blotchy spatterworks behind the top layer (the three panels) and then erased all the white using the magic wand to highlight the area and the delete function or the eraser tool to get rid of the white background within the frames so the colour madness showed through. I went for this effect to highlight how mad their silly slapstick world is at this point, before the relatively sensible 'story' takes over and the backdrops will bcome more 'normal'. I also made greater use of non-black outlines.
This is planned to be the longest of their capers yet, so look out of it on DeviantArt and the inevitable tie-in book!
http://www.granitoons.deviantart.com/.
Above is page 10 from the latest Stan the Crow comic 'Shelter Skelter' in which Stan and chums manage to get fee run of the farmer's house while he jets off for a winter holiday. Many thanks to Google for helping me draw an airplane and to Farmer Giles for allowing me to screw with his brain once again! In this scene he's getting somewhat nervous during his flight and...well I won't spoil it. But let's just say he's having trouble leaving his work behind.
The idea for this strip actually came from an old comic back in late 2001 when I could barely draw the characters. I seemed to get worse before I got better for some peculiar reason. Back then, it would appear I decided to expand the story shortly after drawing the original newspaper style strip and wrote a script about it adding more gags. More recently I started to redraw it, working from memory as the script did a vanishing acts from my archives. A few pages in and a printout of the script mysteriously turned up and now I'm picking up from a logical point in it and carrying on, adding more (hopefully better) lines and joke on the way. I'm actually glad I decided to start without the script now as I believe the version that's on DeviantArt (and will be in the new Stan the Crow book very soon) is a far better version. The image above is for part 3 and should be on DA very soon. All traditonally coloured apart from the speech-bubbles.
