Before & After (Patreon)

Having worked professionally as a storyboard artist for several years, I've been self-taught and trained to approach my work as objectively as possible. There are many moments when working as a storyboard artist that calls for ideas to be scrapped, and hours long work to be thrown out almost mercilessly to make way for better things. Working on comics, for me at least, has always been a chaotic, organic process. I will often times go over draft pages I've done and make numerous phases of iterations. What you see in the final products, printed books, are the results of constant fine-tuning and correction. Here in this sample, I was troubled by how static Pridestar's new boyfriend is presented. I wanted to capture the emotion of surprise and shock that Tanz and Groover would've felt at this revelation, and wanted readers to experience the same reactions as Tanz and Groover would. I've opted to lower the camera angle to mimic Groover's POV and push the posing further. In the BEFORE image, Snares looks completely disinterested and indifferent with Pride's approach. He's completely spaced out, and it makes one wonder if they're even together, or more so the whole thing being a one-way relationship. By having them share mirroring poses, it also juxtaposes their size difference and provides a stronger sense of impact when Pride first reveals his new companion. The new illustration also breaks out of the panel, creating a "pop-out" 3D effect, a technique that's more commonly used in action comics. Due to the pose change, I've also made some minor adjustments to give Tanz and Groover more headroom for dialogue bubbles.