Days Gone 9 - Location, Location, Location, pt 1

As I said much earlier, one of the things that appealed to me about this story was the small cast (whom you've "met") and a limited location. In fact, the whole thing takes place inside a single location: A mountaintop cave which happens to be the lair of Clawfire the Wicked.

My very first thumbnails for the story opened inside the cave and all action took place there. But when I started to flesh it out, I instantly realized that I needed an establishing shot to show where the cave was located. So, I drew the rough draft shown below:

Original rough draft sketch for page 1
of Days Gone. © 2017 Mike Mitchell

As you can see, my sketch is very rough. The sketch is 100% of its final printed size, with the various boxes representing the bleed, trim and safe zones for the story. I created the template in Photoshop based on the template provided by my printer, Comix Wellspring. I also pre-printed the intended logo for the story (but that's since changed, and moved to page 2).

The goal of this image is to set the scene for the story, with a fantasy-type mountain as the scene. The switchback path on its front was added to help give it a sense of scale. You'll also see that I originally considered adding a bunch of trees or a village to help set the scale and give it a sense of place in the world.

As you'll see, very little of that survived my first attempts at actually creating the image.

Next Time: Finding the right 3D resrouces