100 Days of Making Comics - Day One - Denting Cardboard Boxes

Happy New Year to the each and every Internet User!
Apart from the bad ones, not to you, you go away and think about what you've done....

Welcome to 100 Days of making Comics, a challenge in which the goal is to spend a minimum of 30 minutes a day working on or towards comic creation.
This is day one, and the first of a new year!

I may switch between which comic I'm working on depending on what goes on each day but the majority of posts will be work on the comic book series JAR, written by James Fletcher with art by myself. The amount done each day will depend on what day of the week it is, given day job work etc.
But each day I'll post an update of what I did, with an image or two and a brief explanation. I also might add in some non comic related news if anything vaguely interesting happens.
Click on any of the images to view larger.

So onwards with day one!

I'm actually posting this at the start of the day, I've got a busy one ahead but I've done around 40 minutes of pencilling this morning since I got up, currently working on a page of the comic, doing detailing on a panel, here's a pic...

For the pencils I work in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, mostly just because I like the feel, it does have it's limitations such as when you zoom out it becomes harder to see, with a lot of the pixels not being rendered, but for detail work that's not a problem. I'll most likely ink and colour in Photoshop as it has better inking tools and is definitely better for colouring.

Today I worked on the cardboard boxes that are lying around the floor, they start off as cubes with very straight lines and of course don't look very much like cardboard boxes at all at this point!
So that means going in and erasing the straight lines and re-drawing them by hand, making sure they actually look a little less precise and more interesting, adding dents and folds where they've been handled over time, giving it all a slightly more lifelike (hopefully) look.
I also added some patches of texture to the rug on the floor and the arm chair in the corner, to make them also look more aged and worn and a little less clean and flat.

When laying out the object in the room everything is done with rulers and guides tools to get it all in the right places, looking the way they should in perspective.

That's it for today, I've got some journeying to do by train so i'll take my notepad and sketchbook with me, where I'll be working on my own graphic novel series, mostly doing some story plotting and maybe a small amount of sketching if any visual ideas come to me that need to be made note of.

Have a great day one of 2017 and see you all tomorrow for day two!