REFERENCE, REFERENCE, REFERENCE!



After spending over eight years drawing "Dandy & Company", I'd gotten out of the habit of really researching to draw things right. Sure, I did a LITTLE research over the years when designing some of the characters houses and such, but for the most part, I was able to get through a full years worth of strips without doing research more than maybe 4 or 5 times a year.

Drawing a humorous comic strip with loose, cartoony art offered me lots of wiggle room to make things up as I went along and that was FINE. But "The Wellkeeper" has proven to be a very different animal.

While the character designs still have some intentional, cartoony exaggeration in them, I'm going to great lengths to make sure that the world that Zoe, Sebastain and the other characters inhabit has as much realistic credibility as is possible.

The image above is from a page in issue #2 showing the aftermath of an explosion. While I'm not going to spoil just WHAT blew up or why it's important, I will say that a considerable amount of research went into what is only a two page sequence in the overall story.

In this panel alone, there are 2 ambulances, a police car, a fire engine and considerable amounts of rubble. The RUBBLE I could just make up, but I wanted to be sure that this sequence was as realistic as I could draw it. There are shots of the inside of the ambulance, close ups of paramedics and police officers and a view of a paramedics stretcher. All very specific real world things I COULD have made up from memory if I wanted to. But, like I said, it's important to me that this world have credibility.

Have you ever been in the back of an ambulance, for example? It's nothing like the inside of your creepy uncles van. I've only ever been in one once, but my brief ride was enough to convince me that I couldn't remember everything I'd need to render it accurately. That an important point... "DON'T TRY TO WORK FROM MEMORY!" With the internet easily available, that's about as lazy as it gets. It took me only a few MINUTES to find a bunch of great photos showing me all KINDS of details I never even noticed when I was strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance... Hand rails on the inside of the doors and along the ceilings. Tracks on the floor that keep the cart from rolling around. Sliding door cabinets along the walls rather than swinging doors. Multiple lights on the interior ceiling. Diamond plating on the interior of the door. Details galore that add the weight of reality to a single panel drawing.

So, that's the moral of this story, kids. Do your homework.