Vol 2 cover - pencils 1

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Sun, 09 Nov 2014
Subject: Plok comic strip

I penciled the finished background design, on an A3 sheet of Bristol Board if anyone's interested, and this stage took me AGES.

I have about three human anatomy reference books here, and not a single one had a view of a muscled human torso in plan view, from directly above, so I had no help at all with Rockyfella. My knowledge of back and neck anatomy is pretty poor, as you can see, so I just kind of made it up. He's not human, and can change into any shape, so I think I can get away with it.

This is where I started to have doubts about the whole thing. The crater looked OK, but as I started to draw in the rocks and debris, and the trails of disturbed earth, I just didn't think it worked any more. I couldn't get the rocks to look like they'd come from the crater or were the result of an explosion, or get the disturbed earth look like it was caused by an explosion. It all looked really fake and unreal.

I spent ages just staring at it, wondering if I should throw it away, or if I could fix it somehow. I decided that most of the background (other than the characters, I was happy with those), was going to be obscured by Plok and logos etc., and just plough on.

You can see the borders marked at the edges for the two different cover shapes (0.75 to 1 and 0.7 to 1). I did this in a really bodgy way for Volume 1 (that was my first time, and I wasn't prepared for print sizes), so here I decided to do it properly and make the width of the cover the same for both sizes, and extend the height on the thinner cover, then I also left plenty of space for bleed, etc.

Tags: plok, ebook, volume 2, cover, process, drawing, pencil, anatomy

Follow up post: Vol 2 cover - pencils 2

Predecessor post: Vol 2 cover - sketch

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