I've done quite a bit of messing around on Photoshop with my comic pages. This has mainly been colouring my pages but I've also explored playing with the backgrounds. I found some really cool paper in an art shop near where I live, I didn't know what I'd use t for at the time but it was really cool a knew I would find use for it at some point. The paper was handmade and had a really awesome sort of rough texture. I felt it would go really well with my kind of rough style I usually default to when I have no reason to use a particular style. I got plain hand made paper and two patterned ones; one with a marbled pattern and one with a black line-y pattern.
I realised when looking at my A3 comic pages that these patterned pieces might make good backdrops for the images.
I tried both and found that the marbled background actually works really well.

I was later colouring a full page image and kept feeling like the image was lacking somehow. I played around with using the paper as a layer and decided it worked really well at adding texture to the background so put it in over the background but behind the figures. I think the end result was very effective.

A big problem I've had with colouring on Photoshop is that the colours kept being too bold and bright. I tried to select more muted colours but this made too many of the colours similar or didn't make much difference. Bright and bold colours can be good sometimes but it didn't really fit with the mood I'm trying to set. Also a lot of what happens is at night so it wouldn't make sense for everything to be all bright and colourful. I got around this issue by colouring with the bright colours but at the end creating a layer over everything except the line work and filling the layer with a colour that sets the right atmosphere and reflects the setting and then changing the opacity of the layer until I think it dulls the colours in the way I want.

 To put my comic idea into action I started by planning out the pages very roughly in my sketchbook and then drawing a fuller version my A4 sketchbook. This let me figure out how I could make the pictures flow into each other and make sure the page works as a single image. Also I really enjoy drawing with pen and didn't want to leave that behind completely. After drawing a page in A4 I'd then copy the layout to A3 and draw it with ink and a brush. Usually this would be an almost exact copy from the A4 version just with some minor tweaks to make the image flow more or to overcome something that can't really be done using ink which I had put in the original piece.
For a lot of the pages I had trouble not using panels, so I did use them but made them sort of part of the background. This is mainly for the scenes in the park where most of the scenes were naturally framed by trees already. I went with this and framed the pages and panels with branches of trees which helped the page link together and become one image.

Looking at my pen and ink A4 versions and my A3 ink versions I think the A3 versions are stronger as they obviously develop from the A4 version and there are the advantages in drawing with ink that I talked about in an earlier post. I can however get a wider range of textures with pen so I may work into my ink pieces with pen to get a bit of range of texture.

As part of my outside of uni projects I've been submitting work to Stamp Press as a freelance designer. You can find my designs at Stamp Press, I only have a few at the moment but am going to continue submitting designs. The good thing about doing these designs is I can pretty much draw what I want however there are quite a few rules I have to follow such as only using original work and not copying from photos with any sort of copyright. There are also a lot of rules for how to format the image before submitting which can be a pain.
I've started by submitting drawings which I had done in a way that I knew would definitely be able to turn into a print, using solid lines and not getting into too much detail. I will explore a variety of styles however and see how far I can go with some styles while still having them be able to become a print.