Comic Series Planning - Part 1: Concept Art

As the handful of people following this blog know, I have been fairly quiet of late.  Other than mentioning a few Supergirl fanfic comics I've made, and making a couple of posts about how "busy" I've been, I haven't been updating this blog very much.  I discussed a few of the reasons why that's so about a week ago, but now I'm going to reveal a little bit of what's kept me so busy all this time. It's not that I didn't have any spare time... it's that I was working on something I wasn't ready to make public yet.  And I'm still not ready to make much of it public, but I thought I'd post a small glimpse.

First a little bit of history.  I've always loved to write, and particularly to do creative writing of fiction -- usually either fantasy or science fiction. I've also loved comic-books for many years, and when I was a kid, I wanted to write my own comic-book. The problem, of course, is that I can't draw worth a darn.  Oh sure, I tried as a kid, and for a 10 or 11 year old, my drawings weren't so bad.  But when it comes to the human form, I'm terrible at it.  And so, although I always wanted to write my own stories in comic-book form, I never could.



But thanks to DAZ Studio and programs like Blender, I've been able to generate some of my own artwork without having to be good at drawing line art.  I can purchase beautiful models with lovely textures made by 3D artists way better than myself, and then "pose" the characters and props in a scene to make the image for my story.  The result usually is acceptable, and sometimes comes out a darn sight better than that.

And as you also know if you've been reading this blog, I have used these tools to create my own 3-part story arc, in comic-book form, of Supergirl.  I was going to do more than that, but as I explained previously, there are too many pitfalls and frustrations with working with Supergirl -- even though she is my favorite superhero of all time, and I've always wanted to write for her.

And so, I have started working on my own comic-book series with original concepts and characters.  I have pages and pages of backstory already written, and am starting to work on the plot (I have the thing plotted out in a very general way but I still need to work out many details).  I'm not certain yet in what form the series will be released, and that will be announced later. Right now, I am leaning toward a Webcomic format, where I release 1 page per week on a given day (say, every Wednesday).  This should be something I can keep pace with -- I can easily do a 6-panel page in about a week in terms of posing and rendering the characters.  And that pace will leave me time to do other recreational things -- I won't be doing "nothing but my comic" every time I have a free moment, which I suspect would quickly suck the fun out of it.

I'm not yet ready to announce the title or the names of any characters, or the premise, or anything like that. But I would like to share some concept art for the main character.  After much downloading and plenty of money spent on the DAZ shop, I have finally settled on a character model I like a great deal.

The face, skin tone, and probably the hair are set (although the hair style will of course change from scene to scene, since hair can be tied up, let down, curled, etc).  The body is still a work in progress... I am vacillating between the body that goes with the head and skin of the model I am going to use, or a body that goes with a different head.  Right now, I've used the body for the other head (for those who know about DAZ, this is the FW Neomi head and skin texture atop Aspen's body.  Both of these are character models based on the Gia 6 character, which is more athletic-looking than the other DAZ ladies.  I chose the Aspen body because even for this set, I thought she looked more "buff" than Neomi.  I'm not 100% sold on it though... so I may either do some tweaking or go with the Neomi body. We shall see.

Anyway, here are a couple of test shots with the character from front and back, and a nice action pose, since she will be a martial artist/action star type character.

These are mostly concept shots, showing the basic model I will use for the character. Clothing will of course be different -- she's just wearing the most basic clothes that come with the DAZ Studio program. I have tons of other really great clothing options for her already and will buy more... but for the purposes of testing, I didn't want clothing to get in the way (often it will interact badly with the body, and this can distort what you see of the character, thus defeating the purpose of a test shot).

Please note also that this is a default lighting scheme - no extra lights or shadows were added to the shot, and it was rendered against the DAZ background -- DAZ's equivalent of a blue-screen.

That's all for now. I've also been working on fonts to use for the comic, and have a few options. I will present my favorites in an upcoming post.