Garanos Rendered
February 1st, 2009. Categories: Student Art.March 2007
Garanos first came about as part of a group project in high school. As happens with people at that age, the various members drifted off in their respective directions, and I am no exception to that. Still, I walked away with the character who would become my creative focus to this very day. I was bound and determined to tell Garanos’ story, whether others joined her or not.
As a senior in high school, I took a composition class, in which one assignment was to write a short story in the Gothic style, as we were reading Dracula at the time. Many many hours later, I went to class with a ream of 37 pages; needless to say, my short story was the longest in the entire class.
Nonetheless, during my first year of college, I attended panel about self-publishing one’s own comics on a very low budget. It amazed me how easy it could be, so for the next two weeks, I spent all my free time drawing Garanos from beginning to end, with intent to digitally color and finish the pages for printing. As is life, one thing led to another, and I wasn’t able to work on them again for a span of several months. The following year, I took my first Art & Tech class, Digital Manipulation. For my final project, I took three spreads of two pages each from my Garanos pencils, produced them in full color, and had the set of three spreads framed for the Art & Tech Show.
Seeing those pages in full color inspired me to take a fresh look at Garanos the following summer. Considering both my style of drawing and digitally coloring my artwork had improved immensely in the time since the pencils were first drawn, the task of going back and repairing 160 pages of old drawings was daunting, to say the least.
Instead, I started over from scratch. I began redrawing everything in a full-page, 8.5×11 format (I had previously been working at 5.5×8.5, half-sheet format) and used Photoshop to digitally color everything in my emergent style, almost completely lineless and vector-like. I started publishing the pages online in July of 2006, with any new pages I completed going up three days a week.
Since the Art & Tech program helped me to further visualize and improve Garanos with just one class, I wanted to see what three dimensions could do for her.
