Tag: Kahnwake

The Eunice Williams Story, page 11

Posted on by Dan

p11detail2Page eleven of the story I’m working on for Fulcrum Press & Jason Rodriguez’s Colonial Comics anthology.  Another scene at Kahnawake.   THIS was all I had for a “script:”

Eunice, about 15 years old, working in the fields, when she sees a handsome young warrior coming back from the hunt. Zing!

This would be the meeting between Eunice and her future husband.  Eunice did marry a Mohawk man named Arosen, but how or when they met is pure speculation, so I speculated.  I did some sketches in between caricatures at an event (ignore the silly childrens caricature border and that woman with the glasses):

p 11 sketches

 

Then the thumbnail (with bonus silly sketch and some numbers in the margin!):

p11 NEWthumb

 

As you can see, I decided to make this page / scene a bookend for the one on page 8. Two key moments in Eunice’s integration into the community/coming-of-age. I used an almost identical panel layout, with the large panels at top-left and lower-right demonstrating the “arc” of the page via Eunice’s change in attitude; and then the story being pushed along by a series of looks and glances in the smaller panels that take up the top-right and lower-left quarters of the page.

Also I had some problems with the way I drew Eunice in the first panel.  She looked like she was tipping over.  I just “straightened” her up with photoshop…panel 1 rough A

 

…see?  (here’s the rough pencils/inks:) (with some of those sketches I did on the caricature sheet thrown in because I couldn’t do any better and why not?)

p 11 rough FLAT

 

Oh, and I liked this little pencil sketch trying to get Eunice’s attitude in panel 4, so I just stuck it in the rough as well (before printing it out for light-boxing the final art).p 11 detail sketch

 

Final line-art:

p11 sizedFinal?  Yeah, right!  Seeing it now, I feel like Eunice’s head is too small in the last panel.  I’m going to try and fix that digitally before I color it…

 

The Eunice Williams Story page 10

Posted on by Dan

eunice williams p 10 detail blueline

Page 10 of the project I’m working on for Jason Rodriguez’s Colonial Comics anthology from Fulcrum Press.

My outline-y script reads:

Eunice further assimilated into Kahnwake culture. Daily life centers very much around corn: planting, gathering, drying, grinding, cooking.
Being invited with the women to the fields is a big moment.

The home life in the longhouse is warm and communal.

So this is essentially a non-sequential page, but a series of vignettes that add up to Eunice’s generally happy childhood at Kahnawake.  It’s a matter of putting the anecdotes into an overall page design or architecture that really can be read in any order.  Since she left no written record of her time there, it’s all made up.

I definitely wanted to make use of the very first sketch I did for the story:

Longhouse interior with Eunice and new family
Longhouse interior with Eunice and new family

Then  lot of scribbling to figure how to arrange things:

p 10 (of 13) stuff

The thumbnail:

Eunice Williams story, page 10, thumbnail, Dan Mazur
Eunice Williams story, page 10, thumbnail, Dan Mazur

The rough. I decided to curve the drawings in that middle tier around the “archway” of the bottom panel, giving it more of an architectural feel:

10 rough c

The final line art, with blue pencils showing.  No real reason to show this, I just like the way the blue pencil looks (the scan’s patched together, hence the different coloring):

eunice williams p 10 scan

And the final:

 

Eunice Williams Story, p 10, Dan Mazur *(line art)
Eunice Williams Story, p 10, Dan Mazur *(line art)

 

Going to be a challenge to color!