SCROLL: Bonus Week 1

Welcome to the first SCROLL bonus week! Throughout this week you can take a glance behind the curtain and learn how SCROLL evolved and how it is created. Do not worry, the comic is not going anywhere. It will continue next Monday with a daily schedule for the first week (except Sunday).

Today I am going to explore the artistic evolution of SCROLL towards the comic you have read in the past weeks. I will not go into the details of my ideas behind the comic as one of my intents behind SCROLL was to create a comic where the art is open to interpretation.

To acchieve this I decided early on that I wanted the comic to be silent, so that images would need to carry the narrative. At the same time I have been practicing figure drawing and using lots of stick-figures for getting anatomical proportions right. Somewhere during one of those praciticing sessions, I realized that the drawings looked like the cave painting depcitions of the human form.

From there it was only a short step towards formulating the concepts behind SCROLL and trying to figure out how to best put it on paper. I did not have a tablet back then, so I had to draw the figures by hand and scan them in. The result looked like this:

After scanning and colouring, the first version of SCROLL looked like this:

This early version has many problems. One of those is that by having drawn the characters once and not being as proficient with a mouse as with a pencil, I simply copy & pasted them and tweaked minor details like the position of the arms. Thus they look stiff and immobile.

Also there are difficulties with the proportions of graphic elements. The 'stitches' that I have tried to use as panel borders are far too big, while the facial expressions of the characters are barely visible. The upper and lower borders only take up space without providing anything.

I wasn't at all satisfied with the result and decided to let the ideas brew while concentrating on other things. A few weeks later my fiancee got me a tablet as a present and I gave SCROLL another try. With astonishing results:

The facial expressions and stiches are gone and the lines are far sleeker. The figure was drawn seperately for each panel, making the images less static. This looks pretty much like the final version. One remaining problem are the off-looking borders of the texture (the cover of a notbook my sister gave me) at the top and bottom. They were the last major tweak that I added to get the finished version. For comparisions sake, the first fragment would look like this without them: