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Duplicity - Complete

More panel wonkiness

Brock Beauchamp
December 2, 2011

As I’m getting more comfortable with the comic, my art, and how to tell this story, I’m starting to explore new and interesting ways of telling that story visually. When I first started Variables, my panels were pretty consistent. They were all square/rectangle with one large panel highlighting the page. I prioritized all panels into 1,2, or 3 categories with 1 being a primary panel and 3 being a small, less important panel. I still use that (somewhat) but lately, I’ve started dabbling with different ways in how comic books can deal with the lapse of time. I may write... View Article

Some opinions on comic book covers

Brock Beauchamp
November 30, 2011

Lately, I’ve been pouring through hundreds of print comics to catch up on stories, both old and new, that I feel I should read. While paging through these stories, I’ve seen a breadth of cover quality – everything from stuff that makes me stop and stare at the cover for a few minutes in awe to stuff that makes me stop and stare at the cover for minutes in horror. As I saw more and more covers, I started noticing a few trends in what made me think a cover was good versus what made me think it was terrible... View Article

Seven days late, but here it is…

Brock Beauchamp
November 29, 2011

Initially, this page was going to be four panels and should have taken just a day or two to finish. Instead, I ended up redrafting the the layout about ten times and the page ended up getting completely out of hand. The end product is okay once I was able to add greyscale to separate the portions of the page I wanted to highlight/recede but overall, it’s still just too much crap fighting for space. I wanted the page to (silently) convey panic and in some ways it succeeded while sacrificing readability. I definitely learned a lot from this page,... View Article

#OccupyVariables

Brock Beauchamp
November 28, 2011

I didn’t really notice that this scene felt very Occupy-ish until I started laying it out. The fact that the protagonist was a protester and faced the cops back in the day was a very organic decision that came about given this character’s background, where he goes in the future, and the state of early 1990s Greece. I ended up reading a fair amount about recent Greek history before I started this arc (a necessity, given my extremely limited knowledge of the country) and damn, the word of the day over there is “unrest”. The Greeks love a good protest... View Article

Don’t stop me now

Brock Beauchamp
November 18, 2011

Because I’m on a roll. Here is page two of Variables. Expect to see page three’s preview early next week, maybe even on Monday. I’m pretty happy with this page, though I got a little “halo happy” with a lot of the objects and next time I draw a cityscape like this, I need to use a ruler (or maybe at least get a more reliable set of Rapidograph pens that will actually draw a consistent line on paper (grrrr). Using a quill is great for humans and close objects, since a lot of line variation is wanted for organic... View Article

Perspective from hell

Brock Beauchamp
November 17, 2011

It may be hard to see it but this is the most difficult page I’ve drawn for Variables… by a long shot, actually. In it, we have a wide shot of Athens and a crowd gathering at the Polytechnic University. The Athens cityscape was obnoxious and once it has been finished, you can’t even tell why. Because of the mish-mash of streets that is Athens without the aid of modern city planning agencies, nothing is on a grid. It goes in every direction. It seems as if you can’t find a street that goes in one direction for more than... View Article