Hmm… I seem to have forgotten to insert the “pamf” sound effect when Silver lands on the ground. I’ll have to fix that later…

Doing Swordmaster Odyssey purely in solid tones of grays means that finishing up a page is a realitively simple task. There’s generally not a whole lot of work that goes into plopping the gray in there.

However, the system has its drawbacks. It doesn’t look quite as polished as it would had I done an ink wash style, giving it a painted effect sans the color. But the most annoying thing of all is the exact tone of gray. Getting just the right shade of gray is simple enough–But when you look at it on another moniter, it’s a completely different shade! Not only are shades lighter or darker, they’re even closer together or farther apart from each other than I may have initially intended! And it looks different yet again when printed, which may turn out to be a small challenge when Book 1 is finally completed and ready for press later this year.

This issue is something I was aware of before I began and, really, it’s not generally that big a deal (color and tone is much greater issue in television, for the record). However, the art style I chose to do the comic in had an unintended side-effect. You see, getting to tone just right for the lips is one of the hardest parts of cleaning and finishing the line work. If the comic were in color, or even just painted grays instead of solids, the differences between formats and screens would be less noticable.

Heh. Always the little things. 🙂

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the original draft for page 4 that we showed off a couple weeks ago and the final page.

Quite a few differences, aren’t there? Even though I know where I want the story to go, it’s not always clear how it should get there. While I have a rough idea of what works best when I put together the draft, I spend a good deal of time thinking about the exact way things should appear on the page before I ever put a pencil to the bristol board.

In “part 2” we’ll look at what’s changed in the second page we previewed… But we have to get to that page first. 🙂

One of the more interesting aspects of drawing the same character over and over again is that you begin to fail to notice certain… Inaccuracies. Take Jessie’s hair, for instance. In the original sketches of the character she has a moderately-sized pony tail. In the first few pages of the webcomic, however, I noticed that I had drawn it much larger than I originally intended. “Oh well,” said I, “I’ll just draw it that way from now on. Of course, by the end of the chapter I had noticed that I had continued to draw it larger and larger. Blarg.

In any case, I’m slowly whittling it down in size. The same thing happened to her eyes. I drew them the wrong way for the first ten or twenty pages, then switched back to the way I had originally meant. A sloppy way of progressing, no doubt, but it works, I guess.

For those who haven’t noticed, we’ve set up an RSS feed for Swordmaster Odyssey. You can find the link on the Swordmaster Odyssey site.

As promised, here’s a sample of what’s to come. These are two rough-draft “storyboard” pages done on index cards. What do you suppose is going to happen in Chapter 3? (The two pages are not back-to-back, they come from two different sections of the chapter.)

If you can’t make out the text, I’ve included it below (in the order it appears on each page):

JESSIE: “I’ll consider it, but tell me why.”
KEVIN: “I need to go to the capital.”
JESSIE: “What for?”
KEVIN: “Hmm.”
KEVIN: “Can’t tell.”
JESSIE: “Count me out.”
KEVIN (out of frame): “Remember that I saw someone do that before?”
JESSIE: “Yeah…”

???: “Lord Silver, you’ve come to my aid!”
SILVER(?): “Get lost!…”
SOUND EFFECT: (Pamf)
SILVER(?): “I’m sure Kevin knows why I’m here.”
KEVIN: “…”
SILVER(?): “Hmm?”
???: “?”