Spooky Tales from Mount Sonora
ENGL122: Making Comics — Fall 2020
Clip Studio Paint
Overview
I took this creative writing workshop taught by Professor Jean Christophe-Cloutier and Professor Robert Berry. It was centered around the art of making comics, and throughout the course of the semester, we learned how text and images could create a unique reading experience. We learned about writing, illustrating, page layout, inking, creating characters and plots, and more. These learnings culminated in a final project we completed together as a class of six students.
Process
By sharing ideas with each other and ideating plots, we decided to do an anthology of comics around the supernatural setting of Mount Sonora. I came up with Mount Sonora when pitching my comic idea: a veterinary student interns at the Mount Sonora Clinic for the summer only to find that not everything is what it seems in the small town.
We divided the roles by comic. Each story needed scripting, penciling / inking, coloring, and lettering. I took over the penciling and inking for Mount Sonora, while two other classmates took over the coloring and lettering for it.
Scripting, Character Design, and Thumbnails
After deciding what our project would look like, we each got to work on our roles. First, I started with the script of Mount Sonora, which went through multiple rounds of revision by my peers and professors. I then came up with character designs and used that along with the script to create thumbnails of the comic. Here are the script of Mount Sonora, thumbnails of the comic, and character design sketches.
Mount Sonora Script
Mount Sonora Thumbnails
Character Designs
Inking
The most time consuming stage was definitely penciling and inking the artwork after the scripting and thumbnailing stage.
Final Product
A classmate of mine was responsible for coloring my pages, and another classmate was responsible for lettering the script in. This is the final result of Mount Sonora!
