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mcrmadness · 3 years

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Madness draws: Behind the Scenes of the “Alleine in der Nacht” die ärzte fan comic.

A few weeks ago I posted this comic:

This post is yet again just another drawing behind-the-scenes post but You can go and reblog the original post here.

And as always, all my ramblings are under the cut!

This one was relatively easy to do because I just woke up one morning and internally died from laughter because this idea just happened like a random pop up window in my brain. I wrote it down to my phone notes and later on also into my sketchbook:

I was laughing out loud when I was drawing those images, Bela’s face still is cracking me up :D And because I’m yet again trilingual with my comics, there’s only one word in my mother tongue and it’s: Bela laulaa = Bela sings.

And other fans might recognize the lyrics of the song, I needed to write them down in order to decide which ones would fit the comic the best.

This one is then again me trying to see how it will fit on a A4 paper. Originally I saw it in my head more like a short, regular comic strip with 3 panels but somehow I couldn’t get it to fit into 3 panels. And 4 panels was too many in a row so I decided to go for a full page then. That caused bits of trouble to me because I normally don’t draw the comic book faces THAT big and it’s surprisingly hard to draw them in bigger scale. (With pencil drawings it’s the opposite, the bigger the better. It’s much easier to draw an eye the size of a finger instead of a size of a tip of a needle.)

Here’s the first sketch! Just the shapes to see how and what I need to draw. Sorry for the awful photo quality again, my phone’s camera has really gotten really bad after these 3 years of use...

Anyhow, the third panel caused me some troubles because I knew how I wanted Bela’s arms and hands to be but I didn’t see them that good in my head so what I did next was to try different postures into my sketchbook:

I also tried this foreshortening technique I saw in a video of after a Tumblr post, even tho I don’t find that too hard to do myself anymore but it was still interesting and can really help making the eye and brain to see the image in 3D. So here I finally figured that I wanted Bela to have is arms like he was singing something very theatrically. I think it turned out pretty good.

Next I struggled with the bedsheets and I figured that I am a bit too good at blocking out information when I draw because I tried to draw unmade beds from reference photos and I’m able to follow a line but also able to completely not see any other lines around the line I’m following. Like I’d often follow a line to somewhere and suddenly notice that wtf there’s SO MUCH MORE lines all over the place in the photo but I just did not see them.

^Here’s two pages in my other sketchbook that I got for the comic stuff especially because the paper is actually white. The bigger sketchbook has light yellow tint to the paper so it can mess up with the colors when I need to try out and look for perfect colors from the colored pencils. (This sketchbook is also smaller aka A5 because Derwent sketchbooks are expensive but this was the only A5 one with a bit grainy paper in white. The A4 one is cheaper and from Mont Marte.)

After a while I was done with the besheet and the rest of the second sketch. I don’t have a photo of the comic with just the lineart, only a photo where the first panel is already colored and now I actually need to talk about the coloring.

That caused me lots of trouble because I really love playing with lights and shadows in everything (drawing, photographing... everything) and I do know how to do the night effect in black and white, but I have only once before done that with colors and it’s never that easy. Plus that one was my first comic when I started drawing again in 2018 and it was not that good to begin with.

I run some tests with the pencils, as well as some shading tests:

Käsi = hand, iho = skin. I use Derwent Flesh Pink (I have a 72 set of Derwent Watercolour pencils) for the skin color and was then trying out other colors to see which one would look the best for shading. It was actually really difficult to do and my sister suggested that I’d use only cold colors but like... how do you use cold colors on a skin without making the character look dead? :D

I imagined that there’s a moon shining in from a window that would be behind the “camera”. I almost ruined the first panel because I wasn’t exactly sure what was I even doing and what did I want from the colors:

Here’s the lineart and almost finished first panel in colors. I really liked the lineart and this would have looked so nice in black and white too, maybe even better. But I just saw that blue background so strongly in my mind that I just had to go for it.

The first panel was really difficult to do like I said and I almost ruined it at some point. But it also taught me something because with the rest of the panels I knew to start with the skincolors and end with the black (I started the first panel with black, I think... kids, never do that, always start with the light colors! :D) and I think the last panel is the best what comes to the colors in the final comic. I also added light blue here and there to make it look more like the colors of a moon at night:

I’m actually very happy with all of the other colors in this panel! It also reminds me of a book I had and used to read as a child. It was about this girl that went to an appendix surgery and all the images were drawn with either colored pencils, pastels or crayons and it looked grainy the exact same way as this one too. It also had lots of red and orange and brown colors in it. (I wonder if I still have the book here...)

Then there’s also the title and “Das Ende”. Originally I was going to do the late 80s logo they have e.g. on the 80s live vhs/dvd but then I just saw another post in my dä blog’s queue and I just needed to do this logo instead!

I had just a couple of weeks prior ordered a pack of white Sakura Gelly Roll pens and needed to test what would make the best compination and with which black!

I also had bought a white paint pen but it’s useless. As you see, it just looks grey after it dries and it just... doesn’t look nice. Plus it takes so much time to dry AND it’s extremely messy and I have paint more in my hands and a puddle on the paper but barely none where it should be. So my choice for the logo was to use either Pigma Microns or Promarkers (I think I chose the latter) and the thickest Gelly Roll aka 10. This was the result:

And I’m actually super happy about how it came out! Couldn’t do that good looking spots on the letters because can’t make splashes with a gel pen so I did a few bigger ones here and there and then just poked everywhere with the pen to make it look more random. You can actually see how it’s slightly whiter than the paper if you look closely, but it’s not too strongly whiter so it looks pretty nice like this.

So, this was less work than the “Widumihei” one but it was also an interesting piece to draw. And I think I have now this comic drawing more freshly in mind so that drawing the next ones (there’s three waiting for sketching already) will be much easier as well :)

#here take the last behind the scenes post then #I mean next ones are going to be actual new drawings because now I'm done with these I had in mind #mcrmadness draws #mcrmadness draws: behind the scenes #my comics #dä fanart #die ärzte

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