Author: Rafal Banasiak
Banasiak, Rafal, 2021 Creating a realistic visual style in the production of a graphic novel DEMONS, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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There are a great number of stylistic approaches to comic book art, and these have evolved significantly over time. The main visual device used in a comic book or graphic novel is a sequence of images. As a visual communicative device, sequential art has a long history; we see it in ancient Egyptian pictographs, comic strips in newspapers, and most recently the digitally produced graphic novel. The evolution of technologies and artistic processes employed by the comic artist has had a substantial effect on artistic possibilities and visual style in the medium (Wyeld & Banasiak 2019). In the late twentieth century, depiction of realism had entered the visual lexicon of comic books and was eventually used to produce fully painted graphic novels as seen in Marvels (1994) and Kingdom Come (1996) by Alex Ross, for example. More recently, 3D digital tools and techniques used in 3D animations, visual effects and video games have entered the comic book artist’s toolkit. This Masters thesis presents my method of producing realistically painted illustrations in the graphic novel DEMONS. It does this by combining photographic referencing processes with 3D computer graphics, being Blender and MakeHuman, and digital painting in Photoshop, to create my unique stylistic artwork for the graphic novel. The accompanying exegesis makes the case for the development and usefulness of these tools and techniques, and how they can be integrated in the creation of a realism styled painted graphic novel. It outlines the key benefits of these methods, including the ability to overcome current creative limitations in depicting convincing realism in sequential art.
Keywords: Demons, graphic novel, comic book, comic, novel, realistic, realism, painted, visual style, art style, art, 3D, computer graphics, digital, 3D modelling, photographic referencing, photographs, digital painting
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2021
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Dr. Theodor Wyeld