Archer of the West

#How It's Made: Archer of the West, Page 1

The next chapter of The Rabbit and the Moon begins right now! Here's the behind the scenes look into the production of the first page to the chapter Archer of the West.

Script

Frame. Kenji Tachibana gets into the woods and he enters a clearing between the trees. They're deep within a wooded region that connects to more of the wilderness beyond that leads up to the side of the mountain -- establish a shot of where they are in relation to the mountain beyond where the wolf used to live.

Kenji is in the clearing and he has an arrow notched. In the distance we can hear Natsumi and Hana calling for him.

Storyboard

A small thing I've been quibbling over in my mind is the useage of "from" versus "of" when referring to the titular "archer." It should probably be "from" since seems to better point to a location, but I like the shortness of "of." Anyhow, the storyboards were drawn really simply for this page since the script was so short. One criticism I have of my own work is putting too much on one page, but since only one page gets published per week, I feel the need to cover a little more ground.  In this case, we setup the idea that Kenji's found his mark. He found the arrow that was shot into the wolf, and we get an aerial shot of a clearing where he and the wolf will meet and face off.

Pencils

Here's the pencil version of the page. I'll do some close-up and comparisons for the the first and third frame below.

Here's a comparison between the pencil and painted first frame:

Take a look at the pencils versus the final inking. there's a lot more detail in the inking. I actually experimented with making some new foliage brushes -- such as leaf vines and clumps for the first panel. I'll write something on how to put together brushes in Manga Studio later as it's a useful skill to have. I think my trees are getting samey -- they just stand upright. I need to have them bend and wind around and fork off a lot more. I also went out of my way to depict different lengths and styles of grass using various brushes and just the good ole G-pen.

To paint the trees I created a new brush. I make a bunch of black clumps using the G-pen and then set up the brush to spray these clumps and very loosely painted in where the sunlight would be hitting the trees. I don't think you need or want to see the individual trees, but rather just the forest of them. For the pine trees I used a tighter brush and drew the shape of a pine tree -- one line going up and then spokes coming out every which way tapering off at the top. I went over some of the "lines" of the pine tree's spokes with black to give it more shade. In the end it's like having different types of white noise layered on top of one another to give the semblance of a forest, but that's probably more for you to decide if I succeeded there. I put in some lines for trunks and then random arcs here and there for visible branches.

That's all for this week's installment of How It's Made.