With my kids away at their granny’s for the school holidays, just outside Clacton on the Essex coast over on the eastern side of the UK the ‘coast’ has been clear to do a little graphics work way on into the evenings. So for the time being I have ditched everything else to go back to working on the comic book project (everything, that is, except the website, which I’ll be extending over the next week or so, including putting in some opening pages of explanation and perhaps some unfinished story fragments for others to finish off or whatever). So I have been revisiting my collection of stuff sent from Angela Fox. Now you may remember Angela suffered a horrendous computer crash some time back and so can’t at present supply any more basic images nor enhance or modify existing roughly sketched out ones. In addition Angela is presently finishing off a writing project of her own, which she is keen to get on with before tackling any more graphic work (except for the images she intends to use in her own book and cover) and which I will tell you about and provide links to when the time comes. Meanwhile my eye was attracted to a small collection of images Angela knocked out for me a while back, albeit in a basic prelim form.
Now ordinarily, if I like an idea or scene, Angela would then go on to put in the necessary detail and smooth off the rough edges; that cannot happen in this case, since the original 3D renderings no longer exist, nor do the figures, props or costumes etc. For example, in the original (see top left) the girl hasn't even got nipples, let alone any ‘equipment’ mounted 'downstairs'. Nevertheless, I thought I’d see what I could still get from them.
So in the next stage, I've put in the girl’s ‘bits and pieces (how coy!) and added in an improved (I think) enema bag or bottle, the nipples coming from a scanned photograph. I have also added padlocks (I SO love padlocks in this type of context – dunno why) to her restraints and added a couple of uniformed figures taken from another of, Angela Fox's creations from the same set - but still retaining the all-grey background (easier to work with, you see).
In the third pictures I've now added in a background - again taken and adapted from one of Angela’s other creations – and added in various shadows and stuff to help make it look more 'solid'. Image four and sooner or later it comes time to add in the annotation and / or speech bubbles – a task which can prove surprisingly time-consuming. In fact I decided to do without speech bubbles with this one, in favour of allowing more of the imagery to shine through and tell the story in its own way. In addition to the annotation I have also added in some more shadowing and shading here and there; for instance, Matron’s clipboard now casts a shadow on our heroine.. I have since completed another two frames from the same set since, but for now you'll have to be satisfied with this one; I am saving the major part of our young late-teen heroine’s anguish for the book!
Please let me know what you think. Your opinion is important! I know I’m behind in answering your comments and emails etc, but I’m striving to catch up having suffered a small bout of post-holiday (vacation) blues. In the meantime keep an eye open on ‘The Mind Control Story Archive’ (link in the right hand sidebar listed some place under ‘Useful Resources’) as I’m writing a piece – on and off – which I hope to get published there! For now though, the major problem I have is in supporting myself long enough to get all this stuff done. Now, whether I can raise a small amount of funding through so-called ‘crowd funding’ through something like the crowdfunding site ‘Kickstarter’ remains to be seen.