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Posts Tagged ‘Nanook’
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This promo illustration for The Last of the Polar Bears, portraying an iconic scene from the first chapter of the story, had a pack a lot of punch with a minimalist execution. With so little detail, it wasn’t difficult to draw, but every aspect of it needed to be just right.
I find it very helpful to create a number of tiny thumbnail sketches, to quickly try out different takes on an idea. Working with a general idea of a polar bear cub poking his head out of the den for the first time, finding himself surrounded by an unending sea of white snow, I created a couple of concept sketches:
In these examples, note how composition, placement, and size of the cub play a big role in mood and feel.
- #1 is a strong close up on the cub’s face, grinning as he takes a peek at the outside world – cute, but completely at odds with the title of the book.
- #2 is closer in feel – the landscape is vast, the cub is small–there’s a real sense of loneliness going on, but it’s so far pulled out from the character that scene no longer feels intimate.
- #3 is almost right on target. The cub is cute and awestruck without looking too giddy. But the centered figure is boring and predictable.
- #4 takes the aspects of #2 that I liked, but moves the cub into the lower corner. The title is placed in the upper right corner to balance the piece.
Once I had the composition figured out, I set about drawing the character.
He went through several drafts (including some slight variations with him smiling, not shown here) before I finally hit upon a version that worked for the poster.
And here you have it, the finished line art of the cub seen in the poster (flipped in the illustration):
Stay tuned for lots more. I look forward to introducing you to this little guy and the rest of his family. 
I’ve finished scanning and compiling the roughs for the first chapter of The Last of the Polar Bears, so I thought I’d talk a bit about my storyboarding process.
Because I am both the writer and the artist, I bypass the step of writing a traditional script for The Last of the Polar Bears, and work straight from a detailed synopsis to rough thumbnail pages. This allows me to be very flexible with my roughs. I read over my synopsis, then visualize the look of the pages as thumbnail drawings while I’m breaking down the actions panel-by-panel. In this way, I can quickly discover whether scenes that are easily described in text work visually, and make necessary corrections.
Here’s page 17 and 18 from synopsis to rough thumbnails, in which the twin polar bear cubs Stella and Nanook experience the outside of the den for the first time:
Synopsis:
Stella asks Nanook what’s up there. The next panel is his point of view. Endless white snow, and arctic twilight. Frostbite (an arctic fox) is also in the shot, but she is well camouflaged. Her tail is wrapped around her face so that she looks unremarkable, like a lump of snow. “Nothing. Everything’s white!” A cold breeze sets his teeth chattering. “It’s cold up here!” Shivering, brother cub tumbles back into the den, and falls on top of Stella. Stella protests and goes into battle mode, but he just huddles against her for warmth. It’s no fun to play with an unwilling partner, so she gives up and calls him a wimp . She asks him if he saw “it”. He shakes his head no. “Just lots of snow.”
I breakdown this description into a list of panels, each with a short description of what I want to bring to the attention of the reader. My thumbnail page layout (template here) measures 4″x6″ on an 8.5″.x11″ page and contains pertinent information such as trim and bleed so that I can plan out the overall look of the page along with composition, actions, and word balloon placement.
Sometimes the pages come together in a very straightforward fashion. Sometimes I’ll end up trying multiple panel configurations. On page 17, you can see that I’ve come up with alternate takes for panels 1, 3, and 5.
Once the thumbnails are drawn, I scan them into the computer and assemble the pieces. Here’s how 17 and 18 currently look.
These thumbnails are my roadmap for the next step: penciling the pages at full size. With composition and content of the panels figured out, I’ll be able to turn my focus to drawing the characters tighter, cleaner, on model, and anatomically correct (to name just a few of many things I’ll be keeping in mind as I work through the pages).
I’ll continue to delve further into aspects of my comic creation process in upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned for more.
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