This is the last of the 4 stories we did for the Virginia Historical Society's new exhibit, "An American Turning point:The Civil War in Virginia". This story has a decidely lighter and slightly humorous tone. One of the things I really enjoyed about this job was the variety of tone each story contained. One deals mostly with interpersonal conflicts, one with espionage, one with the brutality of war and this one shows a moment that could be seen as funny although it does involve the theft of some of "Grandma's poultry".
Initially Bruce and I discussed approaching the story with a very obvious cartoon sensibility, along the lines of the old Warner Bros., M.G.M. and Hanna Barbera cartoons. We especially applied this to the soldiers running with their feet not touching the ground and the use of big animated sound effects. At one point I mentioned how I couldn't believe the museum was letting us handle this in such an exaggerated fashion. To which Bruce replied something along the lines of "we'll see, it hasn't been approved just yet."
As you can see in the revised pencils we did have to reign things in a little. This was for the Virginia Historical Society after all. Having said that they did allow us to keep the soldiers running through the fence with the planks exploding in a completely impossible manner.
On this story I once again had the pleasure of working with Noah Hornstein. He assisted me with the initial application of the colors. He also was kind enough to point out a few glaring mistakes in the drawings and I'm grateful to him for keeping me from embarrassing myself, thanks Noah.
Here is the story in it's finished form, enjoy.
2 comments:
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing the preliminary sketches thru the final. Always a thrill to see the work evolve from the initial ideas to the finished product.
Thanks Elaine, I'm glad you liked it. I didn't go too deep in to my process only because there is so much of that kind of thing on the web that it didn't seem necessary. That and I've done it to some degree on earlier posts on my blog. I guess at this point it would feel a bit redundant.
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