Statement
One of the main ideas behind this project is to use color to convey things about the characters. The three children and the twin’s mother use warmer purple to orange tones, while the town and its people use blues and teals. The story follows a young child and their brother, exploring an unfamiliar town during a festival. During the night they meet a young girl covered in bandages. They initially hit it off well, until their new friend runs into some undeserved trouble. The themes of the comic revolve around how society responds to non-conformity, and how that results in class and racial/ethnic discrimination. The comic ends with a suggestion of solidarity of people oppressed through class and ethnicity. I chose the internet as a way to display the story because I think it makes it the most accessible to a wide audience of people for free; people are more likely to look at my piece if they don’t have to leave their house for it. This will be especially helpful for those who would feel unsafe leaving their homes, whether it’s because of the political situation at the time, or for mental or physical health reasons.
Process
This page is documenting the process of the creation of The Festival, a comic about a set of twins meeting a new friend in an unfriendly town.
Step one: Writing
The first step in my process was to write a rough draft of the script of the comic. I'm a very visual person, but writing is much quicker to get ideas down, so that's where I started.
I started by writing an outline, bullet points of important events in the story, all of the major beats that I needed to hit. After that I went through chronologically and just wrote out the rest. This was all still bullet points at this point, not a formalized script.
Each bullet point had a description of the shot, brief description of the contents, and any dialogue, with character expressions.
Step Two: Outsiders Concept Art
The second step was creating the concept art of each major character, so that I could have a visual basis for the next step. The first character I drew was Anna, then the twins, and finally their mother. These characters are all outsiders in the town, especially Fellia (the mother), and Anna. Anna, despite being from the town fits in the least due to her economic status and her burns.
The way I've chosen to imply how well characters fit in with the town is through their colors. Rather than using naturalistic colors, I chose to use them for their interaction with their environment.
The town has a color scheme of blues and teals, with the occasional lavender.
Step Three: Thumbnails
The next step was thumb-nailing; I used sheets of 20 thumbnails, where I could sketch the pages next to one another to try and make the narrative a bit more concrete and start to figure out the visuals.
Initially I did value thumbnails, but each time I completed a page I went back and added the basic colors under the value to figure out that aspect of the visuals as well. Here's what I've done so far:
Value Thumbnails
Color Thumbnails
