Racing Comic

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the starting line:

Whilst on a family holiday in Austria, I just so happened to stumble across the Austrian Grand Prix

I camped here and watched qualifying, 2 formula races, and a GT race. It was a 34 degree heat wave in the mountain ranges of Austria, I got ridiculously sun-burnt, but the Heineken made up for it.

I knew at this point I wanted to make a comic book about racing.

After having such a good experience at the Red-bull ring in Austria, I went to the silverstone festival, to see races of all varieties and car showcases of both old and new

Inspiration

IDEAS

Car Design

Beginning with the interest in how to design and draw cars better, I looked into people such as Frank Stephenson who made the process a lot easier to understand

Initial ideas/ sketches of cars for a futuristic dystopian racing theme

Taking inspiration from concept cars (Merc Vis 111)
and using natural aero lines for car bodies

Main animal inspiration for car body: Quetzcoatlus, the largest flying dinosaur

First clear designs for the main car

Bringing it into 3D for the sake of better, more consistent reference images

Antagonist's Car

Final renders, then taking the model into blender to be used as reference (as seen bottom right)

Using the university 3D printer, I did a test print of the main car. This helped me see if using it for referene was better than using blender traces, and potentially if I could use this as a kickstarter reward.

Character Design

Initial ideas:
-Main character inspired by Latino racers such as Senna, Piquet, Alonso (pictured below)

Secondary protagonist & Main villain- both germanic in nature, inspired by anglo european racers like Hakkinen, Raikkonen and Rosberg

Female Lead

Developing the villain's design aesthetic

Taking inspiration from Mad Max, I developed the designs for the evil overlord

I found I had an issue with the initial design when it was put into the comic, as the mechanical nature of the helmet meant it was difficult to draw in multiple perspectives.
I also found it bland and uninspired when drawn with less rendering

I redesigned the headpiece of the evil overlord, this time inspired by the myth of Arcadia, and it's werewulf king Lycanos. With this in mind I 3D modelled the new concept so I had reference for the more difficult angles.

Helmets: Inspired initially by Bionicle

Developing the look of the helmet in 3D

Sketches for the commentators, based on Nigel Mansell and Mark Webber

Storyboarding

Storyboard set 1: these sotryboards were in response to the initial notes and text outlining the story. Typically these will need several revisions, as what is written on the page dosent translate perfectly to images

Storyboard set 2: This set is very similar to set 1, but is a lot clearer and more energetic with the visual ideas. Coming to the end of this set though, I came across the problem that the page count was far too high.

Storyboards 3: This set was made after some story revisions that would help reduce the page count. I didnt manage to reduce it by a large number, but found that the pages that were now included were much less visually dense, as there was more action in this final version. This would also help with the speed I could complete them.

interior development

Planning out the environments to ensure the visuals are consistent

Finishing the environment visuals in the comic

Finalising the character designs for reference

Example of page development, from sketch to raw scan, to clean up, to text

Sketching the outline of the main mountain to ensure silhouette is consistent.
Additionally, here is an example of where I fixed here some continuity errors (top right panels).