Since the dawn of my intelligence I am having a penchant towards fairies, tales, stories, comics, and anything and everything that deals with one’s talent giving joy to many. When I was about 9-10 or may be 11-12 years old I was a complete comic maniac, however, more than the drawings, what used to interest me more were the stories. I was huge fan of Raj comics at that time and would not miss any of the comics of some particular characters, say Nagaraj, Dhruva, Doga, Ashwaraj, etc. My waiting for the next issues of comics of these characters was more to do with my enthusiasm at what’s going to happen in next comic. All these factors contributed in me developing my own fictional stories. Most of them used to have no head or tail, but some of them I still remember were really good
When I was 15 years old and was in 9th standard, I decided to write a book, containing some horror stories, a genre which has always excited me. It was a collection of 7 stories of ghosts, spirits, devils, blah blah, compiled into one book. I still have those diaries.
Last year, through a social networking site I came to know a few people who are genuine artists and one of them is Mr. Balakrishna Varma. Mr. Varma is an excellent artist and is professionally into comic book illustrations and drawing. Add to the facts that he is also a big fan of horror genre and an Arian too ! Despite of being so critically acclaimed he is very down to earth and always finds time to answer my queries. It was through him that I came to know about different methods and techniques and materials used in comic book type illustrations. I already know a little about how illustrations can be created using software but I wanted to know the basic hand drawn method.
I decided to illustrate one of those seven stories that I wrote around 7 years ago. This is a horror thriller and the characterization is inspired by Ram Gopal Varma’s film “Bhoot”. I am now done with the comic book and you can go through the comics by clicking on this link
http://www.scribd.com/doc/45102831/Bishop-s-Curse
Now I’ll explain how I made this comic. On every page I followed the following procedure:
1. Pencil sketching: Nothing can beat the pencil sketching. First I draw the entire page with a normal HB pencil along with shadings, and frames.
2. Inking: In this comic book I have tried variety of methods of inking, in few pages I used black drawing ink and Crow Quill pen, in most of the pages I have used Rotring 0.4 and Rotring 0.8 pen that are used in architectural drawing. While inking I created basic outlines, frames and filled the shapes according to the shading
3. Erase the pencil lines: Then I erased the background pencil traces so that not a single mark of pencil is left.
4. Redo the shading: For shading, we can use ink-wash techniques or pencils again. I used pencils for shading.
5. Scan the page and put it on the computer: I scanned the image and uploaded on my laptop
6. Lettering using Adobe Illustrator: Using Adobe Illustrator, I did the lettering. Since I am not a professional in these types of works hence I used a normal readable font “Palantino Type”and have made lots of spelling mistakes in the lettering. I used the basic elliptical and pen tool for creating dialogue boxes. Going forward I would like to do the lettering in a more professional way, may be by hand or in Illustrator
I believe this is just the beginning, and as Mr. Varma says “Life goes on”. I’ll definitely go ahead and will try to sharpen my skills in this type of drawing.
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| Before Lettering |
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| After Lettering |
