SDOAR: Pencils and Mock-Ups

CARSON GRUBAUGH:
Here are the last two pages of 'pencils' completed for the first batch of mock-ups Dave sent me. Technically these are the first page of the issue #1 -#2 bridge, and the last page of the issue #2-#3, respetively. I got my parents to pose for the fender-bender scene but played YooHoo and had Mom pretend like she had been driving Dad's truck and Dad pretend that he was driving my car ; )

Apparently there were some mysterious technical hiccups that led to me not getting the mock-ups for the next two sequences right away, even though Sandeep and Dave swear they were sent twice. So, a delay of a couple of days, which was fine by me since I was still struggling to get over a nasty and persistent bout of the common cold. But, all is well. The cold has passed and the mock-ups are in my hands.

Some of that spare time was spent testing out brushes Dave was kind enough to send my way. The idea was to play with how small can I really get these lines since that is something central to SDOAR. The following should give you an idea of how microscopically small you really can get with a brush.

This head was drawn about 2" x 3", so this is already an enlargement.

Here, you can see how small some the lines really must be. All you see when you are drawing is that things are getting darker but no one line stands out as a perceptible line to the eye.

Here I was testing out an idea for how to subordinate the head behind the walking figure as well as playing with line size. The dimensions of the head are the same as above.

A close up on the eye, again, shows how thin of a line Dave is talking about when he says that the Windsor Newton Series 7 #2 brush lets you go razor thin if used correctly. REALLY THIN!

In his re-workings of my narrative and layouts Dave continues to school me in story construction and page design. I had a very set narrative structure in mind when I took the photos, and was trying to elicit specific expressions from Jack. Many of the shots we got I considered wrong. Dave has been able to use all of those stray expressions and make the general narrative structure I proposed 100X stronger, as well as wildly funny.

Here are the first four pages from the second set of mock-ups, as re-assembled by me in Photoshop for my tracing purposes:

I am really glad this next page is going to be in black and white. In color it makes for sickening Op-Art.

I have also learned that if you brag to Dave Sim, "Oh yeah, photostatting. Pshh. I will just draw all of that stuff over and over. I mean, I painted that crazy painting of YooHoo. LIKE, TWICE! This should be cake," he will send you pages upon pages with large amounts of statted images for pretty much the rest of forever. "Here you go tough guy, lets see how long before you cave and just photostat the damned things." Ha-ha. We shall see.

Per Dave, the majority of SDOAR updates will be moved to his Patreon site, where for as little as $1 a month you will have access to all of the work that goes into these pages as it happens. I will still post here at AMOC on a weekly basis to share some of the materials from each week, but on Patreon will share all of my progress as it happens. As soon as a page is traced, it goes up. As soon as it is penciled it goes up. Etc. I will also post all of Dave's mock-ups over the next few days, along with my Photoshop recreations. In the final transition sequence there are a lot of interesting pyrotechnics in Dave's work that are not in my Photoshop versions.

Also, I am considering filming some of the work. If you are all interested.And, if Dave is okay with it, I will post those to both locations.