First Ideas
In my first week of University we were tested to see what skills we already had to put on the table. Our brief was to create a small comic with 9 panels based on a nursery rhyme. I was paired with one of my peers and we were given Humpty Dumpty as our rhyme.
We had a brainstorm of front cover drawings to get an idea of what we wanted to make. We liked the idea of Humpty Dumpty falling and cracking like an egg and then further progressed this idea that it could become a crime scene where Humpty Dumpty actually gets pushed off the wall instead of naturally falling.
Once we had our idea, I got to sketching ideas down of the story we’d put in our comic. The idea is that Humpty is sat on the wall watching the sunset before the evil king pushes him off the edge of the wall. Then we turned all the king’s horses and kingsmen into police inspectors who were trying to figure out who had killed Humpty and why. We both put our ideas down and discussed the placement of everything including the characters and any typography that we need to include.
Character Designing
After the initial sketches we designed the main two characters you see: Humpty Dumpty and The King.
For Humpty, we looked more into making him innocent. A lot of illustrations of Humpty look very creepy and unappealing so we wanted to stray away from this haunted look. We both collected ideas of what would make Humpty more innocent and settled that a propeller hat worked the best as it is childish and that usually means innocence. For his clothes I took more inspiration from older illustrations and tried to recreate it but much more simplified as a stylistic choice.
For Humpty’s body I played around with different shapes, circles and ovals. I liked the bean shaped Humpty however, it also made him look like he was dumb and not perfect like the shape of an egg. Me and my peer also knew that if we didn’t keep the egg shape then it wouldn’t match the story as well so we settled for the egg shape.
For the kings design we mainly looked into his crown and eyes because you don’t see much else of his body. I focused on his crown first, looking at basic shapes and designs before discussing with my peer. We both decided that the shapes were still too friendly looking so we looked at much sharper, thinner shapes which all in all looked much better and threatening.
For his eyesI looked at more kite/diamond shapes and played around with the pupils. I preferred the diamond shape with a thinner stick like pupil as it felt like a cat which was angry.
Colours
Before making our mockup we trialed out some colour schemes.
We wanted oranges and yellows to begin with as they’re more commonly seen as threatening colours however, just to play around we tried some blues which looked odd but it did progress our plan.
Our idea is that the comic will start in colour and then gradually desaturates and turns grey when Humpty gets pushed off the wall like a crime drama.
Within the grey we then wanted to have only one colour visible, we decided on making the yolk the only colour visible to act as if it were his guts or blood.
Mockup
We created a mockup version of what the final comic might look like, but just pencil sketched in.
After the first week of work, we had a group feedback tutorial. We were suggested that we don’t need to illustrate it as we are graphic designers and that we can get creative and use images.
So, the next week we hopped into photoshop and started putting images together following the mockup we made. We split the pages between us but before we added any text we made a text sample sheet so we knew what kind of font we thought worked the best.
We created the first few pages based on the mockup we made however changed it in the final version as it looked more like he was falling. The old version is the left and the new version is the right.
We finished making the pages and then added the text on for the final product.
In our feedback, the crown in the third page wasn’t visible enough so I went in and brightened some of it up to stand out. I also noticed while I was highlighting the crown that it didn’t look like it sat on his head so I fixed that too.
