Well, I have started a training course (in a field totally unrelated to my digital graphic novel project…) as a first step for a career change! I have also started an intership which is a practical counterpart to the theoretical training. All this took (and is still taking) most of my time and energy. It has been hard to dedicate sufficient time to make significant progresses with my project lately. It’s quite frustrating, but that’s life!

The main news for the last months is that I became father of the little Lydia at the end of January 2012! It is such a great event, I still haven’t fully realized what’s happening… Believe me or not this beautiful little girl is definitely taking a lot of my time and energy! Routine still hasn’t become part of my current vocabulary, however it looks like things are getting progressively settled, and I will be able to jump back into this big project!

Lepcydis twitter feed page

I have decided to incorporated the Lepcydis twitter feed for my online graphic novel project in a dedicated new page on my website, so that minor updates and brief news can be posted and updated very quickly and easily on the website. I will probably focus more on short twitter updates in the near future, at least until I understand how much time I can dedicate to the project on a more regular basis!

In-depth reorganisation of the work in progress for my online graphic novel project

Quite some time passed since my last website update, and since the last significant progresses for the project too… This also gave me an opportunity to digest and rethink what I have been doing so far. I am not satisfied yet with the main focus and structure of the story and plot, which led me to reconsider my past achievements. I really want to secure a great and strong plot before moving on with the preparation of the final artwork, but it’s still a bit too unfocused.

For this reason, I am reading books to learn and improve. I’m also self-training with all the aspects of this project management which are weak or not sufficiently developed yet, by searching more information in websites and books! I also have to find a rythm for moving forward in the project which is in better harmony with the actual time I am able to dedicate on the long run. I still have difficulties in finding a stable weekly routine (for obvious reasons…), but as soon a this can be secured, I am sure that significant progresses will become visible!!

News and updated for the last months?
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Learning and improving from readers’ first reactions and spontaneous opinion

Is this approach in contradiction with the fact of following my instinct and make decisions on my own? Would it alter the personal and independent orientation of this project? Not at all! I have thought and produced the prologue to test-drive the whole process. Getting feedback, and taking critiques into account is fully part of the process to me. It is also highly instructive receiving early comments, for improvements to be made sooner…

Something typical in the production of a piece of artwork is the difficulty in taking sufficient distance and criticism for one’s own work. The exact balance and equilibrium that make things work represent something delicate to understand, however imbalance gets easily detected (especially when it’s not your project or artwork :)). This project is personal and taking a lot of my time. How could it be possible making a bad work on my graphic novel, given that I am constantly thinking about making the best choice possible? That’s exactly the reason why it’s difficult to step back and judge with a neutral state of mind. Well, I want to remain open-minded, and particularly willing to improve and learn from errors. So, definitely no contradiction between following my gut feelings AND receiving the hardest constructive critiques! The sooner, the better…

Decode potential problems and errors to correct it early

What would be the first reaction of a reader? Is there anything among this preliminary work leading to misinterpretation of what I intended to show? People would like or dislike different aspects of this prologue based on their personal types of interests. This is just fine! My guess was that despite their different centers of interest, in case something appears really wrong, any type of reader would see it. In my particular case, actually very few readers were already sufficient to get a constructive idea on what required improvement. That was a great discovery! When several persons who did not communicate to each other, point all together to specific elements, it clearly means that it would be worth applying modifications. I have made 17 annotations directly within the body of the storyboard layout in order to keep it in mind when moving forward to the next steps! This might seem a lot for such a short introduction, the truth is that the pickiest reader was probably… me! This means for sure that the prologue will gain in quality through this revision step.

I look forward to start working on the final color version from now on!!

By the way, I consider that this last draft revision step closes the production of the storyboard:

Integration of useful early feedback about the storyboard for the prologue of my online graphic novel
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- Lepcydis - - - Lepcydis Online Graphic Novel - A fantasy adventure by Marc Welter -

Here are two sketches from the preliminary draft version of the storyboard for the prologue of my Online Graphic Novel! In future blog posts I will organize artwork updates in a dedicated category. So this is the first message about “The Art Of Lepcydis”.

Appearances…

Although there is a medieval inspiration for the theme of these two sketches with the representation of a piece of parchment and a halberd, the story itself is rather a fantasy adventure tale. Things are not quite what they seem…

More information about these two panels

No tree has been harmed during the process of preparing these preliminary drawings! Indeed, going fully digital with the production of my online graphic novel really helps working faster, and better too. No need of paper, given that I am using a graphic tablet with a pressure sensitive stylus and soft nibs that give a really natural touch and feel. No need to draw on paper and then scan, and finally edit and improve the details to achieve this…

About the artwork itself, it is very important for me to focus first on the composition and shapes in order to make sure that I convey the main message of the panel through this compositional choice. It seems like I cannot efficiently combine line art drawing AND gray scale values painting in a single step. In these storyboard sketches, however, I have tried to suggest some mood and atmosphere choices as a second step in the production of the artwork. This extra rendering was quick and will be useful as a sort of global overview in the form of a thumbnail reference when moving to the color painting for the final artwork.

Prologue – A preview of two sketches from the preliminary storyboard version!
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After approximately 40 hours of drawing and experimenting with my first black and white draft version of the storyboard of the prologue-introduction over the last 3 weeks, plus some layout adjustments, I am very happy to show you my small scale preview of the prologue to Lepcydis, the online graphic novel!! My choice of spending more time experimenting and improving my technique has been very fruitful. I have a good hope that I will be able to even increase speed for the preparation of the chapter 1.

In its current version this prologue consists of 26 panels  for a layout file of 1024 pixels large by … 16000 pixels in height!! It is a comics layout format called “infinite canvas”, but I will come back to this in more details in future blog updates. On a standard screen display it represents ~36 cm large by 5.65 meters long (that’s 18 feet and 6.44 inches…). Just look at that!

My latest progresses in the production of the prologue

The fact that I have reached this step (one more milestone achieved!!) is a great and very motivating news! For this reason I publish the latest status of the storyboard production step for the prologue:

As I did previously for the scenario writing, I have decided again to keep the progress status set to 99%. The missing 1% might actually represent more than 1%… Why? Well, I am sending a few invitations to my family and friends for reading and feedback.

Draft review and survey only for a few lucky early readers !

I have decided not to show publicly the draft version, so that you will be able to discover the story in its nice colored final version! For the moment, I asked a few lucky readers to answer questions in a custom survey to know what they like or dislike, as well as getting comments on other details of this draft.

For now, I really want to make sure that any first-time reader understands well the panels and text without any confusion before I set the storyboard to 100% completion. The reason for that is very simple, I will start working on the final color version right after. Therefore I need to feel more confident that the story is interesting, well structured and clear, without major comprehension issue. Of course, I definitely don’t want to mess everything up, or be obliged to make drastic changes at a very late production stage (with the delay that it would induce)!

This time I really feel like I am getting towards my objective! And even if this prologue may look too short to readers, I am convinced that working on it with this new approach in order to manage and master the different graphic novel production steps is highly valuable to me. No doubt that it will positively serve the project on the long run.

Just be patient, things are moving forward!!

Prologue: the preliminary draft version of the storyboard is finished!
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- Lepcydis - - - Lepcydis Online Graphic Novel - A fantasy adventure by Marc Welter -

This project is new to me, so are all the techniques and steps of making a graphic novel. I have been working on the storyboard sketches for Chapter 1, but due to the number of different tasks, and the amount of work needed for each to get completed, I recently realized that I would rather need to go through all the production steps to test-drive the whole creative process in a smaller scale.

At this point, the content of the prologue sort of flashed before my eyes. I knew precisely what to do.

One of the main purpose of my blog until the publication of the story is to give you a progress update. And I am glad to announce that the scenario for the prologue is written:

I decided to keep the progress bar set to 99%, because experience taught me that things need to get fixed while working, and this 1% represents the necessary flexibility before the final version…

I have also been working quite some time on Chapter 1, as I mentioned above. And it is also very important to learn from errors and improve.

Why have I delayed my work on chapter 1?

Very simple: one day, I showed the first part of the storyboard sketches to my girlfriend, asking for her feedback. I had never told her about the story before and it was her first reading of my preliminary work. Her very constructive critiques confirmed my feeling… I needed to give more background information to the reader, and spend more time developing the story.

The idea of writing a prologue…

There were several reasons why I decided to reorganize my work. Basically I was not satisfied with the techniques I used for the development of the first draft of the story. The critiques about the chapter 1 were definitely the trigger and convinced me to change my approach.

Meanwhile, I had found a nice new technique for improving the clarity and the production flow for my storyboard and started experimenting…

To read other updates on the project, I also encourage you to freely look around in the “blog categories” in the sidebar.

A prologue is in preparation – milestone achieved: scenario writing
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Because perfection is not of this earth…

The website is up and running. At first glance it looks fine and there are only few minor improvements to work on, or problems to solve. Therefore, I am happy to announce that I have reached a new milestone! I also would like to remind here that I am not a web developer or web designer, and that I have to set up and manage basically everything on my own (including troubleshooting and major bug corrections…).

I am done with the website development for now. Here is the current progress report status:

Why only 99% and not 100% achievement ? The paragraph heading says it all…

Well, it’s great time to start using it to communicate on my project itself!!

An empty site…

Maybe, developing a website was a bit of a premature idea, since I already knew that the actually valuable content was not ready, and would not be soon after the website launching… Well, I’m not worried, because the project is moving forward quite well. And also, as I mentioned in my previous post, I want this website to help me documenting my progresses, and showing my achievements step by step. So I guess it’s logical that one needs a starting point (right now with an empty shell, and then fill it in with new stuff over time)! Well, that’s exactly the point… Set up good starting conditions, then use the tool!

start with an optimized website structure and improve content management organization

Some might argue that having quality content first is crucial. Yes I agree! But in the meantime, if one adds tons of content, and realizes much later that he’s absolutely not satisfied with the approach, formatting, global strategy and goals, he would have to go through major repair surgery, and maybe even realize that he would have to redo many things (or not…). There is a risk of understanding too late that implementing tips and tricks you’ve learned become complicated, heavy or overwhelming… My choice was to give priority to the structure in order to develop a simple, smooth and optimized process for managing the website and its content on a short term, and keep doors open for longer term developments (i.e. anticipating future needs).

To read other updates on the project, I also encourage you to freely look around in the “blog categories” of the sidebar.

99% satisfied with my achievements in the website development!
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- Lepcydis - - - Lepcydis Online Graphic Novel - A fantasy adventure by Marc Welter -

Afraid to start?

This summer 2011 is a very special period for me. No holidays right now, because I am intensely working on my new online graphic novel project (comics/webcomics). I have so many ideas in mind about a mysterious story filled with secrets, action, adventure, altogether packed in strange and dreamlike atmospheres. This project is much more than a simple story, my goal for the next period will be to bring this weird and wonderful universe to life.

As a self-made artist, this project clearly represents a huge personal challenge for obvious reasons… I am not a professional artist yet, and I will have to figure out how to manage so many aspects of actually making a Graphic Novel! And you can imagine my doubts and fears right now! How should I get started? How should I proceed? How could I provide readers with quality work? Well, today is definitely a special day. It’s great time to overcome the fear of being unsuccessful with this project! Let’s get the project started!!

Making Graphic Novels without making errors?

This question has a clear answer: it’s impossible! The sequential aspect of a Graphic Novel implies choice making and decision making all the time. Therefore trials, errors and iterative corrections are intimately associated to the production process itself.

I am doing all this for the very first time, so I will definitely need your help and feedback to correct errors, and progress to reach my goal… You don’t need to be a professional in the field to give valuable advices, so please don’t hesitate to provide me with your feedback!! For example, my girlfriend, who is highly supportive of my project, is so far my one and only reader and critique of the preliminary version of chapter 1. She pointed to some discrepancies and weaknesses in my first version, which strikingly confirmed several non-explicitly expressed self-critiques or feelings I had. This made me realize that making a graphic novel cannot be perfect from the start. It is an iterative process as well as a fight against time. From a pragmatic standpoint there must be a balance between production quality and production workflow to be able to stay within a realistic timeline. You, Reader, would certainly not be happy to have to wait for ages to get a single comic page update, would you? And if you are reading this post, you must be interested enough to learn more about Lepcydis…

What will you find on my blog?

I would like to use this space to keep track of my progresses step by step. I believe that this will bring me motivation and courage to persevere in my venture too. I will document about the creative process, the production of the scenario, sketches, character design and digital sculpting, finished digital painting artwork, but also some insight into what is going on “behind the scene”.

You will stay informed about the project management and planning, the production steps, and hopefully promotion and marketing as soon as a releasable version of the Graphic Novel is made available.

Last but not least, before I forget, Lepcydis the Online  Graphic Novel Adventure will be offered to you here for FREE.

So stay tuned!

To read other update posts on the project, I also encourage you to wander around freely in the “categories” of the sidebar.

My Graphic Novel – The beginning of the adventure of Lepcydis on the internet
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Welcome !
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