Ambition project: Bright Blood
I made an published the first chapter of a series I've been working on for over a year. You can read it here, and read through the process in this document:
(It is not fully finished yet, as it is more of a draft version)
For this project, we were allowed to set pretty much any achievable goal, as long as we use it to either learn or improve a certain design skill.
For over a year, I have been working on a story for a comic/manga with an online friend. I've been meaning to start working on it for a long time now, but never got to it. So when we got this project, it was the first thing I thought of. My goal was to improve my skills at making comics/manga.
At first I was a little too ambitious, wanting to make quite a long chapter, and preferably a detailed one. But midway through the project i realized this simply was not possible. So I set the goal of making a slightly shorter chapter (17 pages) which was more of a sketchy/draft version, and to make a volume cover for the series.
In terms of character design and story, we pretty much had it all planned out except for a concrete script. Though we already knew what we wanted to do, so this was not a big hurdle. Although this process was not inside the project, I still made multiple versions of the main character Nora throughout the time we worked on the story. The left is where we started, and the right is pretty much where we left off, although it was a more sketchy design, I refined it during the process of working on the comic, and changed some stuff with her hair.
Then came the task of actually making the comic itself. To start off with this, I made a bunch of rectangles which represented the pages, and used these to make thumbnail sketches for every page. Planning it out instead of jumping in blindly. (Though, I still did this with 9 as this was not really planned) I also sometimes jumped around working on the pages and planning for them, as I found this worked the best for me instead of focusing on a single task until it's finished.
Making the cover actually went well without too much trouble. I spent a while sketching and thinking of different poses and concepts for the cover, mainly being inspired by multiple manga covers for series that I personally like such as Dandadan, Jujutsu Kaisen and Trigun. Eventually I settled for centering it around the main character, with hands surrounding her which symbolize her supernatural ability.
Aside from drawing the cover, there was still one hurdle; the logo. Since I'd have to spent more time coming up with a logo, it was hard for me to do it. But luckily I had my writing partner who also dabbles in design to make that. We went back and forth a bit, trying to improve it as best we can, and eventually settles for what you see below, and below that you can see how the cover turned out.
After I finished the first chapter, I published it on Webtoon to make it easy to read. And I shared it with friends to read. I'm happy with how it turned out. And though I'd have loved to do more work on it, this was all I could do given the timeframe.
