The Things We Do For Art | Comic Progress Update #2

The Perils of Perspective

So this page was a little bit of a doozy.

This is the third page of my new comic, still untitled (if anyone wants to come up with a cool name I'll draw you in somewhere). Last night I updated you guys on the first two pages, which you can read about here. You can also take a look at the thumbnails again from that post, I didn't feel the need to repost them here since nothing really changes from the thumbs to the roughs.

From the thumbs to the roughs, I really loved the layout of this page. The page flow seemed to really work and it felt like a nice way to punctuate the prologue of my comic. But getting the perspective down in the tight sketch was a bit of a nightmare.

I have a good enough understanding of perspective that can get me through most panel setups without an exact reference. But when it comes to extreme high or low angles, if I don't have a reference to look to it can take me a ridiculous amount of time to get it right.

This was the situation for the first panel. I spent hours and hours scouring google images to try to find the right reference but nothing was quite working. To make matters worse I also couldn't find images of women sitting in big poofy gowns at that exact angle either.

I tried making my own perspective grid but it didn't feel convincing and the drawing felt very stiff. I tried going off of my sketch and hoping that the perspective would magically turn out right in the tighter sketch; it did not. I even tried the dirty trick of drawing everything flat and using the distort tool to fake the perspective, sort of like this:

photo source

But nothing seemed to work; I had drawn the first panel over and over and over again. I was nearing my wit's end. Then I thought if I couldn't find the right reference photo, I was just going to have to make it myself. So I walked around my room and found a couple of objects that I could use to recreate the setting.

I like to call this piece, "Two Books, Some Jewelry Boxes, A Post-It Note, and Some Tissues". I felt like a mad woman and was praying no one in my house would walk in on me as I was setting everything up but sometimes these are the sort of things you have to do as an artist.

I also took a giant blanket and a pillow and set it up on some chairs to try to recreate the way a poofy dress would fold. These photos really made a difference when I sat back down to my computer.

It's not quite perfect but sometimes you have to move on if you want to get a project done. I've had many a fellow artist not be able to complete a piece because they get hung up on an imperfection. The 2nd panel isn't as detailed as I wanted it either but I was running out of steam at that point and was ready to put this page to rest.

So that's my story. Overall I'm happy with how page three came out and I'm looking forward to more problem solving as I continue along with this project.

Thanks for reading!

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If you'd like to keep up with more of my work you can check me out at the following:

Instagram: @la.fumettista
Tumblr: http://la-fumettista.tumblr.com/tagged/art
Twitter: @TheresaChiechi
Website: https://www.theresachiechi.com/