Category: Petra’s Commentary

The reaction from Episode 9 has been great. Amazingly, resoundingly great.

People have been into every aspect of the episode – the art, coloring, pacing, dialog, backgrounds – I’ve gotten great feedback on every side of the episode.

Below is a collection of ‘pages’ from Petra’s Call.

On the left are images from Episode 9, on the right are three of my favorite images from the earlier episodes. Even with a quick glance anyone can see there’s a big difference in the style, consistency, composition and overall feel of the pages.

While my process is always changing and I’m always trying new things, the biggest contributor to the improvements in Episode 9 is that I made one simple and major change:

I took my time.

Up until Episode 9, I had been working with tight schedules and was always pushing myself for the deadline.

“I have to get all of the pages inked in the next 2 hours – and then it’s done.”
“I have 2 mornings to get the whole issue penciled, if it isn’t done in time, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to inks.”

I needed to take more time and give myself more perspective on the work. This let me do a few key things that weren’t part of my process before.

A) Editorial feedback from my wife. I gave my wife 5 drafts through script to final art. She gave me a lot of dialog and pacing feedback that made a big difference.

B) Redrawing and redrawing some more. From thumbs to final inks, I spent a lot more time sweating the details. It took a lot longer, but it was worth it.

C) Taking a breather. Stepping away from the work to work on something else and coming back with fresh eyes. A big step here was doing the old ‘horizontal flip’ trick, where you flip the art 180 degrees horizontally, which exposes mistakes you wouldn’t have caught otherwise.

D) Putting in the extra time. Making a fully colored comic, plus setting up the site, Flash browser and everything else (you know – day job making video games, wife and kid, etc) takes a lot of time. I had set aside two hours every morning to work on Petra’s Call – and that was it. Now I am spending more evenings and weekends working on the comic as well.

All of these have helped me ‘Level up’ with my work on Petra’s Call and I am at a point where I’m a lot happier with the work I’m producing.

Now – back to the drawing.

I’ve been getting a lot of nice feedback on the backgrounds in Petra’s Call, so I wanted to do a tutorial on how I do them in Photoshop.

A BIG part of my processes for Petra’s Call is speed. Every step needs to be fast. I have about 14 hours a week to write, draw, color and “Flash-up” each episode, which is roughly equal to 2-3 comic pages.

This is the process for doing the mountains, but the same principals apply for the trees, mid-ground and foreground and can also be applied to interiors.
Continue reading “Episode 7 Commentary: Backgrounds on the Quick and Dirty”

(or: Why I love DC’s Wednesday Comics)

A big thing I want to do (and am struggling with) with Petra’s Call is to build each episode to stand alone.

The ultimate goal is that each episode will present a piece of the overall story that can stand on it’s own. If somebody has never read Petra’s Call before, they should be able to drop into any episode and be able to figure out what’s going on – and ideally, want to read more (you know – if dinosaurs and robots are their kind of thing).

This is the goal – and it’s a hard nut to crack. Take traditional comics – 22 pages long, about 6 panels/page – that’s an average of 132 panels in one issue of a comic. 132 panels to tell your story.

Petra’s Call has about 12 panels per episode, sometimes more, sometimes less, but 12 is:
a) An amount of work I can finish in one week.
b) Enough space to build a complete scene.
c) Not even close to 132 panels traditionally used to tell a comic story.

For me to figure out how to get these episodes to stand-alone – I had to look at the episode gap – the events that happen between each episode. In the first 5 episodes – Petra’s Call is very ‘moment-to-moment’. You are with Petra and Kodiak every step of the way. When you finish an episode, the next episode picks up right where we left off.

This changes with Episode 6.

There is a big gap between Petra having the Calling on the back of the T-Rex and Kodiak holding Petra on the river bank. What happened to the T-Rex? Why is Petra lying on the ground?

These are things that don’t directly impact the story – and as such, they don’t need to be shown. I can put them in the Episode Gap – the space where I let the readers fill in the spaces (for the record, I know what happened, but I’ll let you use your imagination).

Finding and deciding what goes into the episode gap is something that I’ve struggled with since I started working on Petra’s Call. It’s hard to find reference for dealing with episode gaps in short form. There have been a variety of different comic stories told in shorter formats, but they are hard to find. I figured I would wing it and find the sweet sport for how to build a scene out of 12 panels.

Then, almost as if DC comics was reading my notes on episodes, they release Wednesday Comics.

For those who don’t know, Wednesday Comics is a new project from DC comics which collect 12 one-page comics in a newspaper format. Each of the stories features a top notch creative team and in most cases, each one-page story can stand on its own.

For a guy struggling with the episode gap, this was like a gift from the gods. I could see how legendary creators put together a stand-alone story in 6-15 panels, making Wednesday comics the closest thing to what I want to accomplish with Petra’s Call (the sole exception being Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman comic in Wednesday comics comics in at 30+ panels).

Going through Wednesday Comics, especially the ‘man’ comics (Batman, Superman, Hawkman, Kamandi) has really helped me decide what I put on the page and what I leave to the reader’s imagination. Which in turn has helped me understand how I can reach the ultimate goal of each episode being able to stand on its own.

Episode 5 looks different from the rest of the episodes – a lot different.

When I first started working on Petra’s Call, I fell into a trap that a lot of creators fall into – I kept rewriting and redrawing Episode 1.

I would finish it, throw everything out and do it again because I had spotted a tiny flaw that apparently required a complete re-write. After spending two months working on Petra’s Call, I had 5 versions of Episode 1 at different levels of completion, but I hadn’t even thought about starting Episode 2. And for a comic that was supposed to put out one episode a week, that was a problem.

My art, writing, Flash Skillz and understanding of the medium were always improving, so I always knew I could do better, so I kept going back and starting from scratch – because I knew I could do better. My wheels were spinning – I was doing a ton of work – on one episode.

I had to start moving forward.
Continue reading “Episode 5 Commentary – Art Style Experiments”