THE GOOD LIFE - PAGE 1

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The Making Of

Character Designs

When I started collaborating on the art with Brandon Page for our next story, this is what I supplied him with to create the character designs:

Oliver

Young male, 10 years old, average in every way with the exception that his father is a billionaire. His pajamas and room reflect the unfathomable wealth of his parents. Everything is big, luxurious and fancy.

Oliver 2

Looks the same as Oliver, but is dressed in homeless rags, like an Oliver Twist version of Oliver. His face is dirty and he hasn’t washed in ages. He holds a weird, futuristic device in his right hand that looks a bit like a claw at the end.

This is what Brandon came up with:

Script

Page 1


Panel 1
Oliver lays in his bed, illuminated by the light of the hallway, which falls on him in the rectangle shape of the door to his room. The silhouette of a young mom can be seen in the rectangular light of the door frame.


MOM
Go to sleep now, Oliver. Tomorrow is a big day.


Oliver
Night, mom.


Panel 2
The door closes and the room is bathed in dark nothingness.


Panel 3

A flashlight turns on. It's pointed at Oliver’s serious, determined looking face. He holds the flashlight just below his chin. The light draws elongated shadows on his face, making the expression look more severe.

Layouts

Of course, Brandon gets the full script and lays out all of the pages, but for the purpose of the Making Of blog, we'll examine the development of the art page by page. These are the layouts Brandon came up with:

My only comment to Brandon was to change panel 2:

"Maybe you can draw a child sleeping, but keeping one eye open, looking at the door. The light of the door narrows to a small beam as the mother is closing it."

Roughs

Brandon supplied us with the roughs - pencils without much detail. This helps us to correct small mistakes in the outlines. Art Director Martin Silva commented that Oliver's eye in panel 2 is unnaturally big and asked for corrections.

Pencils

Inks

Robert Doan inked Brandon's page and supplied a beautiful, crisp page:

Colors

Veteran colorist Ross Hughes colored the page. The EMERGING project aims to support artists who are ripe to break through in the comic book industry as experienced professionals - to give them a feel of how a project comes together in "the real world."

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