Tortured Soul - Page 1 / A Webcomic

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Tortured Soul is our 4th webcomic and will probably be the darkest story we'll tell here.

The Making Of

This is the first page of our first EMERGING comic. The project, started by yours truly, aims to find, develop and publish promising new talent in the comic book industry.

For the 4th story, I collaborated with Raffaele Ricciardi (art), Ylenia Di Napoli (colors). Me, myself and I are the writer, letterer and editor for the story.

The theme that binds all the stories of EMERGING comics together is that we set up a world that is revealed in a different way in the final page with a major twist. It's sort of a Twilight Zone meets comics type of project.

For this particular story, I wanted to do something a little different: create a story that took place largely in the mind of the characters. The challenge would be to create a psychological twist and keep the story twisting and turning simply by slowly revealing the motivations of the characters, rather than having them react to external events. You'll be the judge if I managed to pull this off successfully.

Layouts

I supply Raffa with the complete script and Raffa returns simple thumbnails of each page where we can see how the action unfolds.

Roughs

Next, Raffa provides me with the line art, where the editor can get a basic sense of the environment and anatomy and ensure that nothing needs changing. You don't want to make major changes on a fairly detailed page!

Pencils

After the rough has been approved, Raffa fills in his art with the details that add body to the page.

Digital Inks

For this project, we're experimenting with very rough digital inks. I don't think our experiment worked out so well and it confirmed to me that we always need an inker on every project. Nevertheless, considering the limitations colorist Ylenia Di Napoli was presented with, she did a superb job when rendering Raffa's pencils in clear black and white with Photoshop.

Flats

Ylenia now puts down the base colors.

Colors

Once the base colors are completed, she adds gradients and textures on top of the flats, giving the art perspective and depth.

Lettering

Finally, I add the letters - budget constraints means that yours truly had to learn how to letter on the job ;-)

And that's it, the start of an exciting new adventure. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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