Here is the splash page for the new comics story that starts tomorrow at SeanWardSuperParty.com. The ‘Splash Page’ is an old phrase from the nineteen fifties. It was the name for the first page in a comic book. It was always a single-panel page that gave you an overview of the upcoming story, usually depicting a scene that doesn’t actually happen in the story while giving you the flavor of what’s about to happen. The splash page always has the title of the story on it, as well as the credits so you knew who made the thing. The splash page usually also had the indicia at the bottom, which is that block of teeny-weeny text at containing the copyright information. Now that I’m thinking about it, if I really wanted to go all the way retro, I would have included indicia on my splash page here. Hrrmmm.

Anyway, Here is the splash page for the first story of the new series SEAN WARD’S SUPERPARTY, and I thought you might get a kick out of going behind the scenes to see how it came together!

Up there you can see the finished version. I am very proud of it. I kind of wish it was a poster.

But this was not the first version of the splash page! No no! I tried to draw the splash page and it sucked. When you’re an artist, I think that the skill of knowing when you’re doing something wrong is about as important as doing something right.

Here is the first, incomplete version of the splash page (get ready for crap):

You can click on that to get an almost full-resolution version to look at closely. The poses suck, the faces don’t have much going on, the figures are everywhere, it’s just weak weak weak. At first I started thinking “Maybe it will look good after the inks are on it”, but you can see I didn’t get very far in putting the inks on it.

Not only that, it’s like some cosmic force was trying to tell me this wasn’t the one because I kept making all kinds of stupid mistakes when I was inking. This was all going on very late at night so I put it down and went to bed.

When I got up in the morning, I looked at it and went ‘YUCK’, but I also had my head fill with what needed to get fixed so I got a new sheet and started again. This time I was much more pleased and I turned out the drawing for this splash page quickly enough that I surprised myself.

Here’s what it looked like when it went on the scanner:

Again, click on it for a big one to look closely at.

You will notice that the pencil lines are still there. I don’t erase much before I scan it. I use a really hard lead and my scanner doesn’t pick the pencil up when I’m scanning in bitmap black and white (for the uninitiated, that means that every pixel is either black or white. No grey). You will also notice that I am relying on photoshop quite a bit to make corrections and erase stray lines, especially in the words.

Now, a few words about the words. In the first try, I laid out the words in pencil first. In the second try, I Just went marker to paper. That always comes out looking fresher and more energetic. I don’t recommend you try it though because you are probably not trying to have your title look like a grade schooler drew it.

I hope you got something out of this look at the making of the splash page for Benny Bunny Meets Benny Banana. Leave a comment below and let me know if you enjoyed and watch for more behind the scenes, making-of baloney in future blog posts.