Craft: Full Page Aerial View Spread

Well, my old friend from a few weeks back, the aerial view of L.A. from Amelia, has returned.  This page has come up previously on this blog in a discussion of layouts vs. finishes, and I’m once again working on it.  No, not just inking that same page… but, before I get into that, here’s an anecdote:

I used to work in a restaurant–the kitchen of a country club–and at one point the chef in charge of the Sunday buffet asked me if I knew how to carve a steamship round (that’s a cut of beef often served on a buffet line), and if not, whether I wanted to learn.  After agreeing to learn how to it was done, another kitchen worker took me aside and advised, “Be careful what you learn how to do.  Once they know you can do it, you’ll be doing it every Sunday.”  Sure enough, I was carving those damn steamship rounds for the following bajillion Sundays.

So what does this “be careful what you let on you can do” business have to do with comics?  Well, the topic of my original post on the Amelia page I linked to above was the middle panel depicting an aerial view of downtown Los Angeles.  Since pencilling that page, though, Jason and I had some back and forths about the subject of spreads and bleeds.

In my first book, Farewell, Georgia, I avoided such things entirely, sticking to a strtict nine panel grid.  But in Midnight Sun I started to make occasional use of bleeds–pages where the printed image goes all the way to the edge of the page–to highlight the vast expanses of ice depicted in the book.  Jason’s layouts for Amelia, as thumbnailed, contained a number of spreads (sets of two facing pages that comprise a single image, spread across the two pages), but I decided to go ahead and plan for possible bleeds in all of these cases by drawing them all on single large sheets of paper, with the image drawn outside the normal page space to accommodate a possible bleed.

Once I started inking, though, it was time to decide which of these, if any, should really be bleeds, and which should simply be spreads.  If you look through issues of Jason’s series, Berlin, you’ll note nary a bleed, so I wasn’t even sure any of them would wind up being bleeds.  As it turns out, though, that middle panel of the L.A. cityscape provided the answer.  It was decided that until that point in the story, all the two page spreads would just be regular old spreads–but that, as Amelia looks down and sees the city below on her first time up in a plane, we’d use this as the first of several full bleed two page spreads…. meaning specifically that the page in question would be rejiggered so that the L.A. cityscape wouldn’t be a panel, but rather the first two page full bleed spread.  So here it is in action, from blue pencil (sorry it’s so hard to see, but that’s exactly the point of NP blue pencil, right?) to pencils, to inks–with gray toning to follow soon.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit, being someone who’s taught an occasional perspective class, that I completely “eyeballed” this drawing.  With so many objects at various angles, and no horizon visible it’s actually pretty easy to get things looking okay by eye.  I see a few bits of wanky perspective here in the final product, but nothing too offensive.

So, be careful what you let on you can draw–you might wind up having to draw it a whole lot bigger.