Flashback - Acquisition Page 1
I don't think I've got a single piece of work that went through as many changes as the first page of my Acquisition comic.
I started Acquisition as a learning experience, and I'm so glad I did it, as I think it's informed everything I've done since then. It was something I was always working on between other projects, so there would often be large gaps in time between pages, but I knew it was something I wanted to do.
I remember having a hard time getting the perspective right for this page, and I knew I was making life hard for myself, but I really felt I had to emphasise the height the character was standing at. Going by feedback from other people, I think this actually ended up being the most effective single image in the comic.
The way my drawing style has gone, I would have probably left the inking stage closer to this, and used the colour / shading to emphasise form. I do wish I'd used some heavy lines to separate the arms from the body a bit more, though.
Basically, all I needed to do to finish the inking was to crosshatch the shading in. On later pages, I would have added some shading to some of the windows on the buildings to either side of the cyborg.
For the first couple of pages, I did a full-on colour version. I quite liked this, and only abandoned it later because I was thinking about reproducing it cheaply on paper later on. This came out pretty well, and you can see the coloured, lettered version at the beginning of this post, where the use of colour in the text did help to differentiate the speech of different characters
The shaded, but uncoloured version of Page 1 also works well, I think. I did simplify the colouring for this, no gradient on the buildings to make them lighter the closer they are to the ground, and I might have used some slightly different light shades to separate the cyborg from the cable it's standing on.
I actually had 2 versions of this grayscale page. This is one where I downloaded some proper comic fonts to use, and I was surprised how much of a difference it made. The shades of the text boxes do differentiate the characters' speech, which helps.
I've come a long way since I did this page in 2012. What do you think? Are there elements I should be using more?
