I wanted to upload this a few days earlier, but Tumblr had issues. o.0

After finishing all the drawing (and writing), there was the fun-but-tedious task of arranging them neatly in a booklet! I’m saying fun-but-tedious as I went through many versions and tried out a lot of different things to come up with the final arrangement. I wanted to play around with how the booklet will be read and how I could impose extra meaning in how the panel and text is positioned.

After printing the first version of the booklet, I used a staples for fastening. Quick and cheap. Originally I was thinking about binding it by hand with linen, but that would just take me far too much time. Still fun, though. I also opted for thicker paper, but the staple had had already a hard time getting through the sketch paper (20 pages!), it would never make it through anything ticker. Oh well. ^^

Getting the staples exactly in the middle isn’t very easy either. ^^;

After printing, there were two things that I wasn’t really happy about: all the drawings appeared a little pixel-y and the time transition wasn’t really clear.

I fixed the slightly blurry drawings by vectorizing ALL the drawings and text, so it would consist of shapes instead of pixels, which makes the printer handle the drawings just like typed text, basically, and super sharp printed. Luckily there are tools for that online, I used www.autotracer.org/. If I had to do it by hand I would still be working on it XD The drawback was that the drawings would lose detail, especially in the really fine hatchings. But I think it is still better than that the drawings were appearing as being low resolution, because they were clearly not. 🙁

It is much easier to see in real life than on a photograph, but the top image is after I vectorized the drawing, the one at the bottom is the original pixel-y scanned drawing. You can also see the slight loss of detail.

For the time transition I wanted to use an extra colour, so it would get some extra punch to make it more clear. The whole booklet is actually rather vague, you wouldn’t really get it if one’s not familiar with Ocarina of Time. But I liked it that way, it had to spark that curiosity.

I chose red for dramatic effect. 🙂 I had thought of using a second colour before, I might wanted to RISO print the booklet, a RISO printer can only print max. two colors at once. When I found out that the booklet was going to be 40 pages I quickly dismissed the idea of RISO’ing this as it would be far to much work.

The first test with some red in it: I just painted with ecoline (ink) over the first test print I did to see what worked.

Second test print I did to test the vector drawings and new placement of text and image.

Final spread! I painted the red shapes on a separate paper with ecoline and scanned them in. Tricky, because I kind of had to guess to get the right shape! I wish ecoline worked on transparent paper too…

I also used red for other parts of the story, as you have seen already: 😀

All in all, I improved my inking skills, especially hatching, so mission accomplished! It’s even so bad that I’m sure I could do many of the earlier panels better. Still, I’m too lazy to draw them again, I’d rather move on to a new project. It’s been to long for this one, more than a year even! But I’m very happy that I committed myself to do this and I’m really happy with the end result!

As promised!

When I finished Ocarina of Time I immediately started working on it, which was in June 2015. I wanted to get all the drawing done for September, but I only managed to finish the couplet, which caused me to drag on the refrain in-between school assignments until January or so. I’m almost ashamed to admit it took me almost two years to finish it, as it is in no way a really big project of some sort… I just wanted it to be perfect, haha.

I started by drawing a storyboard. I already had a lot of ideas what to show at which words, so I drew what I thought could work on separate papers and played around until I had the best combination story-wise.

Pretty messy, as you can see. This won’t land me a position as Pixar’s lead storyboard artist, haha! 😀

As soon as I got the storyboard ready, I started to drawing out the panels. I wanted to do this with black fineliners to practice my inking skills. I’m saying panels instead of illustrations because I saw this thing as a comic, later to be published in a booklet, rather than just sitting on the internet. The lyrics would be under or next to the panels.

The text needed to be hand drawn, too. I didn’t want to create a real font, that would be too much hassle. People work on fonts for months, if not years to create something great. I just wanted some hand drawn looking text. And it would be cool if it resembles Hylian writing, so I tried blocky shapes with a lot vertical and horizontal lines. The first sketches were a bit too blocky, as they started to look like early computer fonts. So I put in more curves. And then, the tedious act of writing all the text by hand. You bet I know the lyrics now by heart! lol

In retrospect creating a font wouldn’t be hassle at all: I discovered www.myscriptfont.com that quickly converts your handwriting into a fully usable font. Oh well. I might create a font anyway. 

Stay tuned for part two! 😉