Anatomy of a Dead Person

After having lots of trouble painting in my anatomy class, my teacher told me that I should try using a medium that I actually want to work in and suggested that I bring in my inks and such to do some more comic book related stuff. Unfortunately due to snow, she ended up being absent that day, and the teacher that subbed wasn't crazy about the comic book style of my classwork.

We still had to send her our sketches for homework. The project had to be pirate themed and have a least one dead person in it. My thumbnails didn't show it, but I had a comic book style in mind already. She suggested in her return email that I do a full scale comic page. Which I was all about

During lunch I quickly sketched this beautiful piece of art here just to give her a super basic idea of what I was going for, giving a spin on the word "dead" by using an animated skeleton. I did a small thumbnail with a similar skeleton and really liked it, which helped mold this rough sketch. It took me the whole lunch hour to actually make a single page that had a well enough implied story, which I thought was super important if I was only going to do one page.

That night I went to work. I've been really influenced by Joe Madureira the last few months. ( There's a link for his fan-site on the left) I really like the style in his line work. The day before last I even picked up Savage Wolverine, which he did the lines for issues #6-8. I kept looking at it while I was working.

I was really unhappy with the forshortening in the first panel, so I measured it out and did it on a separate sheet of paper. 

After I patched the top panel with the rest of the page in Photoshop, I made my blues lines and printed it out so I could do the inks traditionally. I hadn't done this before, but I hate inking digitally most times. I printed it out on Ultra Premium Matte Paper, which worked out amazing. It has a really awesome texture for inking, and nothing holds ink better than photo printing paper.

I tried a new way of coloring, using the lasso tool and lots of Hue/Saturation adjustments. I loved the way a lot of it turned out, though I think the backgrounds are lacking. This was also the first time that I chose a definite palette before I started my flats and everything. Which I think helped my ongoing struggle with color.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it. But if I did it again I probably would have moved panels 2-4 along the left side and moved the skeleton to a 3/4 view facing right. Compositionally I think that would have been stronger.