The Merry Melony Production Blog

More experiments in color/shading styles. I think this was pretty successful despite the ugly palette. I’d like to do a series of color scripts soon to find some palettes that work for different environments.

‘Nother panel exploration. Somebody tell this girl to stop checking her cell phone while encased in a frozen ceiling.

Being not very happy with the coloring in the last panel, I had another go at it. I think this is much more successful, some modest tinting helping with readability, plus much less detail, texture and muddiness in the shading. I redesigned the icy asteroid which is working much better (but still probably not final). The characters have just a touch of shading in them. With these exercises I am trying to balance something that looks nice with something that I can color fairly quickly.

When it comes to coloring I am often figuring out things as I do them which takes a lot of time. When I begin this project on the official, I want to have a strong method and a steady timeline.

Trying out some new things with this panel exploration. I certainly like a lot of things but it still doesn’t shine in my opinion. I decided to try out flat colors for the characters and I’m not sure how much I like it. It’s better than the muddy nastiness I was getting earlier. Speaking of muddy, thats kind of how the background turned out. I tried just painting on top of the original sketch to give it a sort of layered, dreamy, textured look, but I think in the end there is just too much information in the background. I think in the future I will simplify the contrast and texture. Also it has become very clear to me that I need to do some designs for the icy asteroid (a recurring visual in the story) as what I wound up with ended up looking like a stupid floating turd rather than something menacing and actually made of ice.) More experimentation ahead!

Work in progress. Still rough colors and finishing linework.

This is my 2nd “panel exploration”, an exercise at how the final product might look, including panel design and text design coming soon.

Hey guys! Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve updated. Between Hatefarm, my girlfriend, and work (we recently started production on our first CG animated feature film, Turkeys, set for release in 2014), I haven’t had much time for Melony. I’m still stuck on the medium I want to do this in — I know branching storylines is too big of a project for me, but I really want to maintain some level of interactivity, and so I’m considering maybe turning this into a game of sorts. I don’t know! Much to think about. But on the other side of things I know where the story needs to go and there is a lot of concept art I can move forward with. Here is some environment design with a little foreshadowing of a new character. I want to clean this up further and color it because I think it’s a pretty solid foundation. Hopefully it won’t be long before my next update.

Work in progress. I found myself unhappy with the comic book coloring style — flat colors and lots of use of black… I’m just not very good at it. I’m experimenting with a new painting style that is relatively quick and maintains a sense of “painterliness”…something I’ve never been terribly good at in the past. Going to color this and give it the full treatment as if it was an actual final panel and we’ll see how it looks. This piece will also serve as some environment design (there is a lot cropped out) and a look at one of the Rabbit’s forms. Should be fun!

Alright back to it! Got some serious concept art and story writing to do.

I’ve been doing some heavy thinking about not cutting out the interactivity, but cutting out the branching story line. Writing 3 separate stories is proving to be way huge of a task and I don’t want to stumble into My-Project-Is-Too-Huge-And-I-Will-Never-Finish-It territory. 

Our heroine, Melony! Learned a lot from doing this. Made a few mistakes in shading, linework, and perspective that I hopefully won’t make again. Overall I hope the shading will be a little bit more simplified than this in production images. Up next, expression sheet!

Quick environment sketch. It’s still too early in the story development stage to be locking down environments, this is more of a look experiment. This particular environment may or may not appear in the final story. Just playing with ideas visually because that’s what keeps me going inbetween doing research.

The idea here is that this is Melony and her sister’s safe haven, in a (very) tiny abandoned observatory. One of the central visual themes of this story is technology. Nature plays a very important role that we don’t see towards the second half of the story. In the beginning, Melony’s world is almost scrapyard-esque filled with wires, tubes, electric parts, and other manmade structures. It should feel very dead, cold, and old. It all plays very important roles in symbolism that I hope to explore more thoroughly in the coming months.

Some creature design, finally! Rabbit takes multiple forms, this is just one of them. Will color this soon. Happy Friday! 

Learned a lot from this test.

1. Separate line work into FG, MG and BG layers (duhhhhhhh)
2. Spend more time on the rough sketch to really define the lighting direction and blacks (blacks feel very uneven and unconfident here)
3. Don’t deviate from original sketch where it’s already working. (I think I deviated a bit too much and either muddled things or made them less interesting)

Here’s a rough sketch of Melony’s sister. (currently nameless other than “Sis”.) I hope to give it the full inking and color treatment. I thought it was time to start exploring both environment and “panel” look.

I have become so enthralled with the way Sam Kieth (yeah it’s spelled that way) does his panels in The Maxx. They are dynamic, expressive, and anything but ordinary. Depending on the mood and environment, they change from simple to outlines to having an actual presence…being made up of sticks, leaves, or perhaps splatters and broken bits of whatever. I figured I should start experimenting with this sooner rather than later, so after several attempts my panels feel less like I am just biting off of him and have a bit of my own flavor. But for reals, the man can draw! I ordered Volume 1 of the Maxx anthology but now I am going to have to get the whole thing, as well as his other comics….

I just finished Scott McCloud’s “Reinventing Comics” and it gave me a lot to think about. I didn’t find it to be nearly as all-around educational as his first book, “Understanding Comics”, but it was still pretty good. In fact, if you can only read some of it, I would say just fast forward to the last 50 pages. There is some mind blowing speculation about how comics will be in the future — particularly digital comics. He wrote the book in 2000, so it sometimes feels dated, but other times he is right on point. I particularly loved the way he talked about abandoning the concept of “pages” in digital format. If we have the technology to make the comic one giant flowing wall mural, why not do that? Or even better, have the comic zig zag in different dimensions and bring it in through 3D planes? Still dealing with panels, still dealing with the space inbetween the panels, but there is a lot of room to revolutionize the way they come on to screen, the way they leave the screen, and so on.  It’s a little daunting, because the possibilities are endless, but I want Merry Melony to be anything but “next page” and “previous page”.

The original intention was to format the comic for Ipad resolution, and to eventually have MM on the Ipad. But now I’m rethinking it so that I could just focus formatting it to PC screens. Maybe there is a way to effectively do both. I dunno!