Notebook 4 - Circa 2020

I'm pretty sure it was 2018 when I started working with alcohol markers, and like my last notebook, this one is the starting concepts for a comic book. This time rather than going directly to a laid out story, I began with a few character studies.

 However, before we get to those bits, the first few pages set the context for the notebook. I can see an address which clearly suggests the year, because I was only living in that small town for 12 months, and some design layouts for some furniture I had intended to build because other pieces of furniture had died during moves of house. 



Now we get to the character study...

This was generally intended to be one of six characters that the comic was going to be centered around, where each of the characters interacted with two or three of the others, but none knew the whole group of six, and none knew the entire complexity of the story unfolding around them. The only people to know the whole story were a a narrator figure, and the audience of readers who would be gathering the pieces of the mystery as they events unfolded.   

This was all intended to link into my "Familiar" game as some narrative fiction to help support the universe where this TTRPG is situated. 

So I needed to make sure I showed a range of action shots and character study shots, working on the assumption that elements of the comic could be used as demonstrations of how the game mechanics work in Familiar. 

With a range of action shots, and character study shots, I also needed to make sure that I kept track of which colours were being used out of the 400 or so alcohol markers in my set. This was done to ensure consistency across the images, and because I'm pretty badly colour blind and wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally use the wrong colour and shade from one image to the next.

After these colour shots, the images start dropping back to linework studies.

And later in the sketchbook there are some sketches of other character udeas that might have been ,making appearances as supporting characters in the story.




I remember doing most of this during COVID when there wasn't a whole lot else to do during the lockdown period that we had here in Australia in 2020. Returning to work was quite busy and this project ended up going on the back-burner along with so many others.

I'm sure some of these pictures will still end up as a party of the "Familiar" project soon. 

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