Final Major Piece Evaluation

For my final major piece I wanted to create the front cover for the second instillation of my comic book series “Sanctuary”. I wanted the cover to feature the main character, Alex, in the foreground holding a key (a significant object in the story) and a petrol canister, with a burning school in the background connoting the idea that Alex set fire to it. This will create interest because readers will question why he would do something like this.

The artists I took inspiration from were Mike Mignola, Yusuke Murata, Dave Gibbons, and Jean Giraud (Moebius). I chose these specific artists because they are all comic book/manga artists so their area of interest is the same as mine. This made it easy to adapt aspects of their work into my own, these artists already largely inspired my art style because they created the comic books I most enjoy.

Other sources of inspiration for my project were video games and films. I was inspired by Fallout 3 and 4 which helped me imagine what a world destroyed by war would look like and helped me realise that I first had to create a pre-apocalypse aesthetic for the world and then destroy it. Assassins Creed Syndicate helped me to create the aesthetic for the world because it is set in Victorian London, which relates to my steam punk theme. Films such as Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead helped inspire the tone of how my characters interact, the setting and the story, as they are films set in apocalyptic, life-like worlds but with a comedic element similar to Sanctuary.

I went on visits to Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival. This helped influence my ideas and drawings because I took pictures of things that interested me wherever I went and used some of them as a reference for drawings. These drawings helped me develop the aesthetic for the architecture and natural settings for my comic.

I was originally going to create a rough draft of the comic as part of my project but later I decided to focus more on creating posters and pages in my comic book that needed to be created on the computer. This included the front cover and the map which goes on the inside cover. I changed this because I realised I needed more time to create my art on the computer, this decision allowed me to make my posters to a much higher standard as I had more time to notice and improve areas of them.

I experimented with Photoshop to improve my skills with certain techniques that are beneficial when creating a poster or front cover. I created some art early on using a quick drawing I did and the gradient map feature on Photoshop over the top. I used this same technique in the creation of multiple pieces after this.

I used India ink fine-liners to trace over some pencil drawings in the process of creating posters and I used them to create the pages in the first issue of my comic. In the comic I also used grey pens to add some colour to any water in the comic so it was easily distinguishable from the land, and blue watercolour pencils to create Alex’s time power scenes.

I experimented with using the image trace feature on Illustrator to improve the look of my comic pages but it took away the imperfect line work that complemented the post-apocalyptic setting, it also took away some details such as the white of character’s eyes. However the line trace feature was very successful on pieces such as my conflict poster and the final piece as it smoothed out the line work and colours and it just helped everything to look right together even if they were originally drawn separate.

The target audience for my project is generally people that read comic books (more indie rater than mainstream comics like Marvel and DC). The comic is aimed at a more mature audience too so that we can create a more realistic and brutal image of the apocalypse, we don't have to tone down the language as much and we can show explicit, graphic violence.

I arrived at my final piece idea through experimentation of different comic book cover compositions as thumbnail sketches. This allowed me to review and compare all of the designs at the same time and arrive at the one I wanted to use.

I think the final piece is successful in the purpose it is supposed to serve, which is to be appealing and striking so as to draw in readers for my comic book. 
However I think I could have improved the way I did the lighting in some areas, such as on the mechanic's right arm as it looks almost luminescent. I could also have added some shading on the main character's nose as the eye appears to be too far away from the nose bridge.