Hereville without Barry

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Ampersand

I always enjoy seeing what Jake’s colors look like without my drawings and word balloons getting in the way.

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9 Responses to Hereville without Barry

  1. 1
    gin-and-whiskey says:
    July 5, 2012 at 5:43 am

    Fascinating.

    I enjoy learning about this stuff. Between you and everyone else, how many total people are involved? How many person-hours does it end up taking to make a completed page?

  2. 2
    Ampersand says:
    July 5, 2012 at 6:55 am

    When it comes to drawing the art, there are three people involved.

    There’s me — I do the layouts, the lettering, draw the figures in black and white, and sometimes (including in the example here) draw the backgrounds in black and white as well.

    Then there’s Tina Kim, who wasn’t involved in book one but is helping out on this book by drawing backgrounds on some of the pages (again, in black and white).

    After Tina and I have finished our work on a page, it goes to Jake, who provides the color. The color palette was worked out by myself and Jake.

    How many hours go into a page depends a lot on the page. For me to lay out, letter and draw an easy page (one with only a few characters, mostly shown in close-up), without backgrounds, takes between 7 and 10 hours. A harder page (one with lots of characters shown full-figure) can take me 14 hours.

    I’m not sure how long Tina takes per page, but I’d guess around 4 hours. Of course, it depends on what’s in the background. (A page in Fruma’s stupid study with all those wretched bookcases takes a lot longer to draw than a forest scene, for instance.)

    And it seems to me that Jake can color a page in 2-3 hours. (For many comics the colors can take a lot more time than that, but Hereville has a very limited color palette, which turns out to be a lot quicker to apply than a fuller palette. Plus Jake’s a pretty fast worker.) Jake tends to take longer to color the first page of a scene, because that’s where he has to experiment and figure things out (what colors look good on this outfit? Etc).

  3. 3
    Robert says:
    July 5, 2012 at 8:34 am

    You should create a virtual 3D Hereville world with complete backgrounds. Then you could just set the camera wherever you wanted and take a background snapshot, then add your foreground/action art to that. Sure, it would take millions of hours to create the world, but then it would save you thousands of hours of redrawing backgrounds.

  4. 4
    Ampersand says:
    July 5, 2012 at 9:36 am

    For me to lay out, letter and draw an easy page (one with only a few characters, mostly shown in close-up), without backgrounds, takes between 7 and 10 hours.

    Then again, I just did such a page, and it took me from 11pm to 9am. So 11 10 hours for an easy page.

    Robert, I actually have created (or commissioned) 3d models of some of the major sets and buildings in Hereville. It won’t draw the backgrounds for me — they’d look like crap if I just used what the computer spat out — but they do save me a lot of time.

  5. 5
    Robert says:
    July 5, 2012 at 11:31 am

    Cool.

  6. 6
    Dianne says:
    July 5, 2012 at 3:31 pm

    Does this mean that sometime soon the next Hereville book will be coming out?

  7. 7
    Ampersand says:
    July 5, 2012 at 6:32 pm

    Does November count as soon?

  8. 8
    Robert says:
    July 5, 2012 at 10:15 pm

    No. You suck. Work harder.

  9. 9
    nm says:
    July 6, 2012 at 6:08 am

    Yeah.

    I think the page you show is fascinating, but mostly it makes me realize how much I enjoy your lines. It looks like a page from a whole different story without them.