Struggling with color. And value. And drawing.

Here’s a line drawing I haven’t screwed up with paint yet.

Not a comic, but trying out different ways of drawing the same panel. My original idea was the bottom right, with just one touch of color. Then I tried making the trees more gestural (drawn faster), making the color areas more stylized, etc. Ink, watercolor, collage in sketchbook.

(Smithson the webcomic begins here; I started drawing it at this page in the story.)

Another ink-and-gouache panel from a Smithson tryout story.

Here’s the full page that yesterday’s closeup is taken from, a tryout for a painted Smithson story. Ink and gouache on bristol. The lettering was done later, in Photoshop.

The plot concerns a dying gangster/sorcerer, so I tried to go for a kind of gothic woodblock print effect. Solid areas of color with large amounts of black. I didn’t plan out the artwork very thoroughly, so it was handy to have all that black to fall back on. It came out okay for an early attempt at gouache.

I get frequent visits from this one, usually in cahoots with the Aimless Web Surfing Creature.

Click for full-size image

Some of the many things I couldn’t fit into the comic:

• The webcomics panel on Friday was entertaining, with a lot of contrast between the folks on stage. Kate Beaton’s slideshow moved at machine-gun pace—you’d barely recover from one punchline before another drilled you in the gut. (She also had a great, underplayed delivery when reading all the dialogue.) Randall Munroe was in a more leisurely and analytical mode, showcasing entire XKCD strips in a slide. Dave Kellett was a little in both camps, doing fast and spirited readings of his strips, then slowing down to emphasize a point.

• Webcartoonists love Emily Dickenson.

• I really hope that Roth video makes an appearance somewhere on the web; there’s at least one frame I’d like as a desktop background.

• A color guard performed at the awards ceremony, and another crew shot confetti over the crowd. Abe Lincoln was also there, in the balcony; at one point he overpowered some kind of prowler that crept up on him.

Related: see Kate Beaton’s Reubens comics and Mike Lynch’s Reubens jam comics. Update: and here’s that video with Tom Gammill and the Roths, on Mike Lynch’s blog.

I broke off the comic to go on a vacation, but what’s here has formed the nucleus of a longer and more elaborate story, which I hope I can get out after Sweetened By-and-By.

(I’ve shown these pages on the blog before, but scattered across several posts. Here they’re all in one handy gallery. Click on any of the thumbnails to see the full image, navigate to the next, etc. How did I get to 2011 without playing with Lightbox galleries?)

I’ve torn up a lot of my first attempt at Sweetened By-and-By, but had this test page lying around, and decided to mark it up as described by Santoro.

Weird. Looks like I got most of the action within the “dynamic” areas—the areas constrained by those two circles—and have some interesting tangents and alignments.

I like most of this page (though it’s going to be re-drawn again), but the fourth panel has always given me trouble (what’s shown here is a paste-down.) That panel’s not quite right somehow. Maybe these magic lines will help? I think that would be the real utility of this system – as a way of troubleshooting an existing composition.