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Description

This is an illustration for a fanfic I wrote. I did a limited selection of scenes from the fic as comic pages in order to test out different methods and styles of making comic pages. This is not and will never be a full comic adaptation of the fic! There are just a few one-off pages that don't directly connect! (also some miscellaneous illustrations) I know there are a lot of full fic-to-comic projects on dA and this is not one of them. I do not have the patience, frankly, and I admire those who do.

This page uses a thin lineart pen on marker paper, digitally colored. I was also tinkering with various things relating to panel borders and lettering. I've used similar methods before, but I had gone a while without doing any comics so I wanted a refresher.

Converting this fic to bits of comic turned out to be more difficult/interesting than I anticipated, too, because even though it's my own writing (shamelessly using someone else's ideas & characters and sort of aping the style, but I still wrote it), it's not written the same way I would write a comic. There's a lot of POV navel gazing in the fic that I had to try to turn into visuals or just throw out. (also, big old word balloons... I usually try to keep my dialog a bit shorter)

This is a bit from Chapter 1. Gollum has just (narrowly) survived the War of the Ring, and is now too physically weak to get up to his usual gollum shenanigans (for example, he probably would not have accepted offers of food/clean clothing/bedding/medical attention if he had the alternative of biting people and running away, but he has been in and out of consciousness and can't move, so he doesn't get a choice. hooray!) and is also too confused and in shock to be as much of a jerk to Aragorn and Gandalf as I'm sure he would usually want to be in this situation. Later on, of course, he will be more capable and alert and we'll have to see what kind of choices he makes then.

I like to stick to one character's POV throughout a scene (and usually throughout a chapter) before switching to another one because otherwise I feel as if I can get things muddied, break the reader's immersion in the character's head that I'm currently using and also give away too much information too soon, so in the prose I didn't say what Aragorn is thinking, and Gollum is presented as quite bad at reading people. I tried to avoid blatantly saying 'Gollum couldn't read people's faces' at any point because I thought that if he was unable to parse that kind of information he wouldn't even realize what he wasn't noticing,but observations from his perspective will try to omit facial expressions or say they're not conclusive, or otherwise present people as confusing and large. Particularly in the early chapters where he's coming off of being feral.

So in the fic, the only information given (here and in most of his other scenes) mostly sticks to 'Aragorn is here and he's saying things and Gollum is confused/offended?/wants to be offended and thinks he should be offended/wishes Aragorn would leave'. The context Gollum doesn't know is supposed to be that Aragorn is realizing at this time that Gollum appears to be making a recovery and not dying (this was not guaranteed), and in fact- horror of horrors- something will have to be done with him long-term. Being a generally kind person, Aragorn's next step is to try to find out if Gollum can be lucid or reasonable by trying to have a real conversation with him. Maybe they can work something out?

In fact, Gollum is doing his best to be reasonable, but he just can't understand what's going on. He has nothing all that constructive to say but can at least convey that he's not malicious. at the moment, anyway. The discussion ends with 'well, no one's mad at you, Sméagol, and since you still can't get out of bed I guess we'll just sort of...leave you here... for now... it smells bad in here'

Anyway, I don't like sticking a lot of internal narration into the comics because I think it breaks the flow (some people can pull it off to great effect but I'm not one of them). All of the preceding information is trying to get in there via people making faces and some dialog. I think limitations like that are usually beneficial to the end product, because I might have the mad impulse to jam all of the information into something, but readers typically don't need as much information as I could theoretically put into something and will get more out of something if there's a little bit of ambiguity in it to chew on & interpret.

Description

This is an illustration for a fanfic I wrote. I did a limited selection of scenes from the fic as comic pages in order to test out different methods and styles of making comic pages. This is not and will never be a full comic adaptation of the fic! There are just a few one-off pages that don't directly connect! (also some miscellaneous illustrations) I know there are a lot of full fic-to-comic projects on dA and this is not one of them. I do not have the patience, frankly, and I admire those who do.

This page uses a thin lineart pen on marker paper, digitally colored. I was also tinkering with various things relating to panel borders and lettering. I've used similar methods before, but I had gone a while without doing any comics so I wanted a refresher.

Converting this fic to bits of comic turned out to be more difficult/interesting than I anticipated, too, because even though it's my own writing (shamelessly using someone else's ideas & characters and sort of aping the style, but I still wrote it), it's not written the same way I would write a comic. There's a lot of POV navel gazing in the fic that I had to try to turn into visuals or just throw out. (also, big old word balloons... I usually try to keep my dialog a bit shorter)

This is a bit from Chapter 1. Gollum has just (narrowly) survived the War of the Ring, and is now too physically weak to get up to his usual gollum shenanigans (for example, he probably would not have accepted offers of food/clean clothing/bedding/medical attention if he had the alternative of biting people and running away, but he has been in and out of consciousness and can't move, so he doesn't get a choice. hooray!) and is also too confused and in shock to be as much of a jerk to Aragorn and Gandalf as I'm sure he would usually want to be in this situation. Later on, of course, he will be more capable and alert and we'll have to see what kind of choices he makes then.

I like to stick to one character's POV throughout a scene (and usually throughout a chapter) before switching to another one because otherwise I feel as if I can get things muddied, break the reader's immersion in the character's head that I'm currently using and also give away too much information too soon, so in the prose I didn't say what Aragorn is thinking, and Gollum is presented as quite bad at reading people. I tried to avoid blatantly saying 'Gollum couldn't read people's faces' at any point because I thought that if he was unable to parse that kind of information he wouldn't even realize what he wasn't noticing,but observations from his perspective will try to omit facial expressions or say they're not conclusive, or otherwise present people as confusing and large. Particularly in the early chapters where he's coming off of being feral.

So in the fic, the only information given (here and in most of his other scenes) mostly sticks to 'Aragorn is here and he's saying things and Gollum is confused/offended?/wants to be offended and thinks he should be offended/wishes Aragorn would leave'. The context Gollum doesn't know is supposed to be that Aragorn is realizing at this time that Gollum appears to be making a recovery and not dying (this was not guaranteed), and in fact- horror of horrors- something will have to be done with him long-term. Being a generally kind person, Aragorn's next step is to try to find out if Gollum can be lucid or reasonable by trying to have a real conversation with him. Maybe they can work something out?

In fact, Gollum is doing his best to be reasonable, but he just can't understand what's going on. He has nothing all that constructive to say but can at least convey that he's not malicious. at the moment, anyway. The discussion ends with 'well, no one's mad at you, Sméagol, and since you still can't get out of bed I guess we'll just sort of...leave you here... for now... it smells bad in here'

Anyway, I don't like sticking a lot of internal narration into the comics because I think it breaks the flow (some people can pull it off to great effect but I'm not one of them). All of the preceding information is trying to get in there via people making faces and some dialog. I think limitations like that are usually beneficial to the end product, because I might have the mad impulse to jam all of the information into something, but readers typically don't need as much information as I could theoretically put into something and will get more out of something if there's a little bit of ambiguity in it to chew on & interpret.