Page progress and issues - Page 1

This first page of the story, is useful to examine in progress, as it captures a number of the aesthetic/process decisions.
​

Figure 1 - Page 1 draft working through colour and lettering issues.

I'm fairly pleased with the colour palette on this - it's set in the same location, so it was easy to stick to the palette I created for  page 2 (the first I coloured). A number of bit part characters appear on this page, and I had to give them distinctive hats and colour schemes. I wondered at first if the bright red of the first character was too attention grabbing, as I want people to focus on the character, who is the protagonist.I would have changed it, but his clothes denote a military officer, which I thought made sense as the first witness of the battle Uccello is about to paint. Hopefully that fact that we are seeing the protagonist face-on, and his reappearance with different witnesses in the other two panels, establishes that he is the one we are more interested in.

This page introduces the idea of imagined images from the battle scene and Uccello's portrayal of it. I think it is helped here by the fact that the witness is describing events that the artists is trying to visualise, and hopefully this will let readers accept this device in subsequent pages. I made the imagine image fairly translucent in the first panel (this still needs some tweaking, then mores solid in the second panel, and more clearly in colour in the third (though still paler than the colours of the 'real' scene).

I will probably want to put some texture over this scene, and possibly the whole comic, but I'll make that a separate post.

I have changed the lettering from my initial historic looking typed serif font to the hand-lettering style Alex Toth font. It was the least jarring hand-lettered font I could find, although when I first tried it it seemed a bit heavy for my relatively fine drawn lines, however here I have dropped it down a font size to &, which seems to help that.

One issue visible on this page, before and after changing font is different spacing on different bits of text. This appeared to be a result of importing text from my earlier attempt at this story in Manga Studio 4, which seems to have wider spacing between the letters (seen in the top right text in panel 1). The seeing the two styles side-by-side, the wider spaced version looks to me better and easier to read - however I haven't as yet worked out how to change the other text to match that.

The medieval style of balloons are from my first version. I haven't decided how to do the final balloons, but I think this style works with the new font. I don't think the placing of the thought bubble in the last panel works - it may just need to block less of his face - though this could be helped by using a rectangular caption box.