Chelsea and Millie

Greetings and Salutations and other such C. Slater proclamations, dear readers!
Here’s a bit of a look into how I go about creating the visuals for C&M pages.

Some time ago (around 13 months back, in fact) I got the notion in my noggin to do a “step by step work-in-progress” blog post on this site (a site that I had yet to even begin to put together at that stage), to give youse guys a peek into my general page-drafting process.
I reckon it’s high time I got around to actually writing that blog post, so here ’tis; a set of WIP piccys for “Mess You Up” page 05.

The “8” is there because the “Prologue” and “Mess You Up” sections of this comic story used to be joined together as one section, in terms of page numbering, viz. this was originally “Prologue and Mess You Up page 08” not “Mess You Up page 05”, ya dig?

I got this far into inking this page before I hit upon the idea of doing a WIP thing.

I was going for a lopsided and rickety look for these old attic stairs; they’re a bit neglected and could do with fixing-up, but seeing as the Gishes rarely venture into the attic (indeed, this is Millie’s first ever trip up into it) Clover and Alain haven’t yet gotten around to sorting that out.

They bought the house at a somewhat on-the-cheap price, as it was quite a “fixer upper” at the point of sale. And also on account of a lot of unsubstantiated by reliable sources yet still persistent rumours that had floated around the Lake Aklo township over the years about the house being haunted.
Prior to buying it Alain and Clover had the house checked for “supernatural residents” by and a small team of ghost-hunter types led by Clover’s brother Justin (a notable parapsychologist), but over two weeks of monitoring the house they turned up with zilch. But this is because the ghost within the Gish house is very very sneeeeaky, as you’ll see soon enough, yup.
Anyway…

Yeah I pretty much always leave their eyes devoid of pupils and irises at this stage.
Yes I know it makes them look really weird when you’re not used to seeing ’em like this.

No I’m not British, I spell “colour” with a “u” and “penciled” with an extra “l” because I am Aotearoa-ean.

As you can see, I have altered the angle on the ceiling boards in panel 01. This was to try and accentuate the semi-dilapidated nature of them thar stairs, but I don’t think I quite managed to pull that off as well as I would have liked.
And oh look, I got rid of the door. Because that wall is actually an outside wall on the other side, and I could have kept the door as it could have lead out onto a balcony, but, it does not. I now feel I should’ve put something in that space though, like a painting, or part of a painting.
Looks a bit blank even with the addition of the dialogue balloon when the page is…

The “wonders” Chelsea is postulating upon include the Lament Configuration, a stuffed dodo, a psychotic-looking rocking horse, susuwatari, a weighted companion cube, and all manner of other random and somewhat anomalous attic-crap that I decided to include throughout the course of this story so the surroundings weren’t just comprised of boring old boxes of stuff and like, cobwebs n’ shiz.

Kept things interesting for me, and hopefully provided some keen-eyed readers with a few visual sprinkles of pop-culture image recognition, for shiggles.

– MV