It all began at Cumberland County College when I worked as a photo editor for their paper. We only published once a month (becuase it was a county college) and as a photo editor it was my job to fix the coloring, take out objects, pretty much touch up the photos to look pretty. Our paper never had any student written comics (honestly who would submit a comic for something that came out once a month?) so it was my job to find comics we could legally purchase to place into the paper. I was extremely pissed off at this work because it was very very boring. The comics we were allowed to buy and download were the lamest things ever and I complained regularly about them and how much better I could do. Of course someone caught wind of my boast and told me to put my talent where my mouth is, so naturally I had to make one. The results were disasterous. I had plenty of material and ideas but being the young age of 16 (yes that's not a typo, I was 16 when I entered CCC) and a new artist, I did not have the experiance needed to perfect flawless characters. The characters within the comic creatively entitled "Doug" (Yes, I have a huge ego. Sue me.) lacked genuine depth or large differences within the creation of them. I used one design to simulate all characters which proved to be very useful at quickly drawing a comic but did not define a character in his/her own way.
Pre-defined character.
The only way to really tell them apart is the hair styling and the clothes. The clothing style is similar to what is shown in College Breed. The comic was centered around two characters, myself and my brother. If you've ever met us you'd see that although there are a few things we both enjoy, personality-wise, we are polar opposites. This gave a nice way to define the characters. Here is the character I used for myself.
Doug
As you can see I adopted the College Breed style from this design. A slight difference though, in this picture the sleeves are short on the overshirt. I normally wear my shirts short sleeved or rolled up so its a bit more realistic, but no one cares about that. My brother's character is not very different in design as you'll see.
Dan
Not much else to say about this one other than you can see my point about differences. Take away the hair and it's the same figure. Of course the only thing I had going for this comic was the stories and at one point I had half of a Flash toon done for it. After returning from FDU my hard drive crashed and I lost many many files. Including the flash which I stupidly did not back up along with other critical files. But I've dug through my paperwork and I've found the storyboard.
"Doug" Storyboard.
The College Breed comic was never my actual intention for a comic. When I was persuaded at FDU
to draw and submit a comic I had originally wanted to start from my old design. I even developed a new design for the characters; something a bit more identifying. This was all and good but the fact was that my ideas stemmed from the "adventures" with my brother so my material was lost. I had to look for new inspiration. Luckily I was paired up with Jeff for a roomy at FDU. Having attented FDU for quite a while I had a very insightful look about the college and it's ...*cough* more interesting topics. Of course there was another comic series already running for the Metro before I entered the paper. This comic ran the characters as people as well and I hated the idea of putting out a comic with the same genre of characters. In all my work I enjoy being original. So one night I was sitting in bed just doodling, as per my usual habits, trying to draw a wolf from memory. Of course it came out really crappy looking. But something interesting happened. On a whim I gave it a little tuft of hair and put big eyes on it.
And it hit me! This was what I would use! But not a wolf, a dog! It was perfect and flawless! The only problem was that the drawing sucked mega ass. If I wanted to use it comically I had to make it look more...comic like. This is the second drawing of it on the bottom right. Obviously a lot to remember but it looked better than the first. I was excited about my find so I tried to sketch a comic hand quickly that would fit the character. It wasn't such a good turn out. It was either mutated or perspectively off by a LOT. I decided to come back to it later.
Quickly recalling the design of my old comic I drew a body out. I tried the hands again with a little more success and I redrew the head. It was good but it wasn't perfect. The face was being defined a bit more but the ears and the nose were still lacking very much. Again I started over, thinking that maybe the flaw was in the clothing.
Now I was getting somewhere. I redesigned clothes, face, ears, everything. Soon after drawing this out I realized a few things. I don't wear ties. It was way too hard to draw this design out. I was liking the hair but I knew it was way too much. I'd never be able to draw this continually. Later I adopt features in this design to apply to Jeff's character. You'll notice it in the sideburns and ears. I decided to combine this one and the last one to create my character and I knew exactly what I wanted now. I ran to my computer.
This was what I came up with. I also had a mind for it to be a full color cartoon but it took way too much time to fill in for each original character pose that's created. This was the reason why I chose the black and white look. You can see where I've kept part of the hair style and ear shape from the more recent pre-sketches but decided to stick with the casual look of the first sketches. Simple and easy to draw.
Here's what you know and love today. The latest drawing of a College Breed character.
Obviously there were many more
sketches toward
the final and I'm perfecting the design still.
Hopefully this has been somewhat interesting.
Thanks for taking the time to see how my idea was made.