ACT 2 SCENE 1 LAYOUT/ROUGHS

Here we have Act 2 Scene 1 where Polonius is talking to a servant about his son Laertes who is in France , Ophelia turns up to tell her Father how worried she is over Hamlet's state of mind, simple 5 pages of storytelling ,note page 44 has Polonius walking out the panel this adds a extra design element to the page so makes the page look more interesting.

mid shots and close up's of faces and bodies are oftern used in comics for conversation panels as you can see by these pages i use this technique quite alot in this second act and scene.

SCENE 1 ACT 5 PAGE LAYOUTS

Scene 1 Act 5 has 10 pages of layouts ,
these where a lot more fun to design and draw, due to the fact it was all about Hamlet's Father his story his suffering and torment and death at the hands of Claudius.

i drew Lot's of close ups of  faces showing emotion to draw the reader in  ,especially of Hamlet's Father which i think work very well. it's the job of the artist to entertain the reader with visuals that can summon up an emotion while the reader reads the story again similar to a movie directors work with an actor for a movie.

As you will see i tilted the camera angles on some frames to add a dynamic to the pages , the characters capes flow in the night wind to look more dramatic ,

also light from different angles can also increase the dynamics of a page and scene such as panels 152 page 35 and 174 page 39.

page 41 the grid again has the first panel the whole height of the page that bleeds off the edges this works well to show the ghost in the underworld and Hamlet ,Horatio and Marcellus running up the castles stairs.

ACT 1 SCENE 4 ROUGHS/ LAYOUTS

So here we are with Scene 4 of the first act ,here Hamlet confronts his Fathers ghost with his friends Horatio and Marcellus.
notice i angled the frames and layouts askew as Hamlet tries to talk to his Fathers ghost, this was done to give the reader a feeling of the start of Hamlets fragile mind started to tip into madness and also add dynamics to the pages, again i played with camera angles to make the storytelling more dramatic .

ACT 1 SCENE 3 ROUGHS/ LAYOUTS

This scene involves Polonius and his family the father, the daughter and the son.

As you will see lots of little notes on the layouts for the penciler to follow , again people talking no action apart from Laertes shaking Ophelia to bring her to her senses about her admiration for Hamlet .

note although the layouts are again rough in some places very rough thanks to tip-ex I've still given quite detailed facial expressions and body language for the penciler to follow.

ACT 1 SCENE 2 ROUGHS/ LAYOUTS

So here we have Act 1 Scene 2
the big problem with this play is there's a lot of talking and very little action
so the key was how to make the pages interesting for the reader.

some things you can do is tilt the camera angles as in
panel 45 page 10, and panel 62 page 14, panel 93 page 21.

Another way to engage the reader is having the character stare out to the reader
as in the last panel 94 page 21

notice as Hamlet is swearing revenge for his Father i have placed heavy shadow on his face
to add drama to the scene this is often used in comics and movies too.

page 19 was a nice play in trying a different panel grid the first panel as half a page
and the another panels just concentrating on the facial expressions of Hamlet and his comrades,
very pleased how this turned out

ALL ART COPYRIGHT CLASSICAL COMICS LTD 2011

ACT 1 SCENE 1 PAGE ROUGHS/ LAYOUTS

These pages where drawn as a guide for David to follow while penciling.

the layouts are roughly drawn but give enough details of the story and flow of action, facial expressions.

you can see page 4 is totally landscape with the panels this grid works very well with large text balloons for Shakespeare.

the play starts with the guards and Horatio seeing the ghost of Hamlets father, you'll notice i tipped the angle of the view of the ghost on the last panel on page 3 to add drama and to make the page look more exciting.

as you can see in pages 7 and 8 I've played around with the layout to add drama to the pages and to keep the excitement building , I learned these tricks by looking at the works of Frank Bellamy's and Alan Davis , John M Burns, Mike Noble, Todd McFarlane, George Perez, Gil Kane . 

A good comic artist must also be a good story teller as in able to tell the action /scenes without help of the balloons
varying camera angles also helps make the story more interesting to the reader , views from above looking down ,views from the ground looking up, close up's, mid shots.
all these techniques used for the cinema are also used by the comic artist.

as you can see I've added the word balloons on the roughs as this also helps the letterer when the finished artwork  gets lettered.When the rough layouts have been approved by Editorial they are then sent to the penciler David Lorenzo Riveiro.

ARTWORK COPYRIGHT CLASSICAL COMICS 2011

THE SCRIPT

Every comic or Graphic novel starts with a script , when i was given the John F McDonald Hamlet script i could not believe how big it was 259 pages ( thicker than a phone directory) total panels 768 in script  plus i have added extra panels along the way,
you get some idea how big a job this has been to create a 186 page comic adaption with notes 200 pages in all in the finished product.

Here is a sample of the script as you can see i have three versions to read for every panel ,the most important thing was that the art leaves room for the large original text in every panel ,as there are three versions published original text, plain text, quick text the same artwork is reused for each version.