My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
Here are the inks of the rest of the 6th page of my fluids comic book. This is how I decided to show the scientific content. I used my own presentation style from the COVID times, when I taught fluid mechanics online by writing on the screen, overlaying formulae and schematics with images.
This is the ink of the panel where the whole story is summarized. The rest is simply explaining the line of thought that leads Ariadne to this conclusion.
This emission nebula in the Cassiopeia constellation resembles its namesake character from the classic video game. It also resembles a heart if viewed from a different angle. It is rather dim and diffuse while observed visually, but is quite neat and full of details when photographed using multiple guided exposures. A small open star cluster (IC 1590) ionizes the gas of the Pacman, which is criss-crossed by lines of dark dust. It also contains several Bok globules, which are isolated dark nebulae that consist of dense clouds of dust and gas. These clouds are in the process of condensing and will form new stars in the future.
This future star nursery is located in the Perseus Arm of our Milky Way galaxy. I captured its light in early October of 2024, after it travelled for 9,500 years to my yard in Victoria, BC. This image is an integration of forty 5-minute RGB exposures, taken through a 478 mm-long, f/5.9 telescope.
Here is the second half of page 5 of my fluids manga. Looking back at these inks, which I made a few weeks ago, I think that the characters became a bit too simplified at this point. There are good reasons for it from the comic book readability standpoint, but I probably enjoy drawing slightly more detailed illustrations. When I come back to these panels for colouring, I might play with rendering a bit more than I originally planned.
Here are the inks of the first half of page 5 of my comic book. A key point that I learned from Victoria Ying is that the text takes priority in a comic book, and the images have to fit around it. I am sure that without this advice, I would have under-estimated how much space the speech bubbles take, even with a relatively small font size.
These are the inks of the last two panels on page 4 of my manga book. That’s the set-up of the story – the rest is basically an exploration of the painting and it’s subject. Stay tuned – it’s quite fascinating!
These are the inks of the first two panels on the fourth page of my comic book. At the scripting stage, I had most fun around this point in the storyline. By this time, I already had a pretty good idea of what the characters would look like and how they would talk, but I didn’t yet get into the thick of the fluids and the math, which are the proverbial vegetables hidden in the smoothie of a detective story. So stay tuned for more updates – hopefully they will be somewhat educational, as well as entertaining.
These are the last three panels of the third page in my comic book. This is the inking stage, and I am planning to add colours eventually.
As you can see, it’s a crime story. But it is related to fluid mechanics – the connection will be revealed later.
This is the ink of the last panel on page 2. It’s the first time all four characters appear in the same frame. I thought it would be a good time to use a kind of “the knights of the round table” perspective to show them as a group.
These are the rest of the supporting characters in my short fluids-related crime story. I enjoyed developing them and making concept drawings early on. However, simplifying those for this inking stage, so that the characters would hopefully be recognizable and easy enough to draw multiple times from various angles was not trivial. In fact, I had to come back to these panels and tweak them quite a bit as I progressed further into the book.