Max Riffner
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Three Hours is Half a Building
I met my friend for a drink last night, and he asked me how work was going on The Grinder, and I said well, I got half a building done, and it took me three hours to do it. See, it’s the establishing shot: first panel of the whole book. So it can’t be slop. The building is actually a food booth. There are three girls in the shot, one at the booth in the background, the second is bent over laughing in the middle-ground, and the third has her back to the reader in the foreground. Now the girl in the background in more important than the girl in the foreground, opposite conventional wisdom. That means my line weights on the booth and the background girl need to be stronger than the foreground, which is weirding me out a bit, but it seems to be working.
Now the girl in the middle almost looks like she is taking a poop and not laughing hysterically, so I got to work on that a bit still.
It sounds like a lot of work writing it out, and it was a lot of work doing it, but if I showed you the panel in question it would look like I had only been working on the thing for half an hour tops. This is the frustration of comic art.
And you wonder why I gave it up. Something like that would take me 6 hours. Then I’d probably scrap it and start it all over from scratch.
The big breakthrough for me was treating backgrounds like they were characters instead of backgrounds. It seems like a subtle change of perspective but it has made all the difference in the world for me. The other part of this too is to realize that you can’t spend that much time on anything. You can labor over a panel for hours but at the end of the day, someone will probably only look at it for 0.5 – 1 second of their life. It’s a throwaway art – treating it like that helps. It isn’t about the quality of the pictures so much as it is telling the story as best as you can.
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Nov 7, 08:06 AM
It sounds like a lot of work writing it out, and it was a lot of work doing it, but if I showed you the panel in question it would look like I had only been working on the thing for half an hour tops. This is the frustration of comic art.
And you wonder why I gave it up. Something like that would take me 6 hours. Then I’d probably scrap it and start it all over from scratch.
I bet it makes you miss the 90s when nobody actually drew backgrounds anymore, they just slapped on a color gradient and called it good…