This project was conceived & written in 2015, but I didn’t start drawing it until early 2021, once I’d finished Lunatic. This page is a record of the process.
Story:
The idea for this story popped into my head sometime in 2015, after I was involved in a particularly rancorous social media argument. I jotted down as quickly as I could, in MSWord. It sort of rambles on in no particular format, so I’m not going to clutter up this page with it, but you can read it here:
Stylistic Influence: Fred’s Le Petit Cirque
My first stylistic role model for HH&HHH was the French cartoonist Fred, and in particular his early-1960s’ series Le Petit Cirque.
So the visual process for this project began in February 2021, by doing copies of panels from this comic. Here are the Fred pages, followed by my study. I had a lot of fun doing these and was happy with the way they turned out. :
Fred’s page
See more of my studies from Fred.
Character sketches 1
The first character studies, from February 2021, just after I had done the studies from Fred above. Maybe the influence shows. I don’t do traditional “model sheet”-type character designs, I just start doodling characters, on different types of paper, with different implements:
First Thumbnails
In late February I thumbnailed the story out in pencil and colored pencil on 9×12 paper. It came out to about 34 pages at that point. I’ve added pages here and there since, but this is still pretty much the way the story goes. Not that anyone but me can make head or tail of it:
Page roughs (pencil)
I drew a full-size rough version of each page of the story in pencils. At this stage working out a lot in terms of composition, story-telling, etc. And I can then assemble them into a .pdf and get a read on the whole story (and feedback from others). Once I move onto inks of course there will be a lot of changes, but for now it’s a pretty solid look at where I’m at with the story.
Color
Sometime at about this point in the process, I made a couple of major decisions. With my previous book “Lunatic” I had never really been sure if I was making a children’s book or not, and I ended up describing it as something like “a children’s book for adults,” which, from a publishing/marketing point of view is probably no-man’s-land. So with HH&HHH, even though I could have remained suspended in that same neither-here-nor-there situation, I decided to declare, “it’s a children’s book.” Maybe a weird children’s book, maybe for weird children, but I decided to stake out my territory and hold it. Which led to another decision:
Nothing says “children’s book” less than black-and-white. So Hannahbell Hobbs is going to be drawn in color. I’ve worked in color some, but infrequently, so I’m not that comfortable with it, and I don’t know color theory or any of that jazz. So I’d definitely have to do some experimenting and get my sea legs, color-wise.
I had worked before in colored inks, using them more or less like water colors, and I had a bunch of old bottles sitting around, so I started to draw color studies, starting with the opening image, Hannahbell’s wagon approaching the village (and if you hadn’t noticed, I pretty much lifted the wagon design from Fred’s Le Petite Cirque)
I feel like the red color of the wagon is a little too much. I want it to stand out, but I don’t want it to overpower the whole image. So, in Photoshop, I tried changing the above image:
Works for me. Here’s another version, drawn with green ink:
And green it shall remain.
Early studies for page 2
A boy working in the fields outside the village gets the first glimpse of Hannahbell’s wagon.
