Late last year I collaborated with a longtime friend and colleague, Sanjay Nagar, to create a ten-page, comics-style pitch book for his screenplay, Apprentice. My illustrations would represent a scene from his story and serve as a tool to help secure film financing.
Unlike most of the storyboard gigs for which I’ve been hired, these pitchboards were not action heavy. On the contrary, the Apprentice scene was all about mood, pacing… and a character obsessed with detail. I’m always up for an artistic challenge, but this last prospect scared me, as drawing panels “obsessed with detail” sounded like code for jam-pack-every-inch-of-every-frame-with-millions-and-millions-of-miscroscopic-lines.
Sanjay also referenced the artwork of Dave Gibbons in Watchmen and Brian Bolland in The Killing Joke—two of the greatest graphic storytelling works of all time—as samples of what he was looking for. No pressure, right?
After spending the last three years drawing and inking my indie comic book series, The Molting, I’d grown accustomed to working in a blotchy, expressive, urban visual style. For Apprentice, I knew I’d need to employ a much tighter, cleaner illustration technique.
The story also called for the integration of existing artwork—the oil paintings of William Holman Hunt—so I had to devise a way to feature this non-comics artwork into a comics medium without compromising either work.
Like with most creative endeavors, it took a bit of work to discover the visual language of Apprentice, but once I got into it, the panels and pages progressed relatively painlessly, and I’m very pleased with the end result. My The Molting collaborator, letterer Oceano Ransford, provided the finishing touches to the illustrations with a few well-placed sound effects and captions.
The entire ten-page Apprentice presentation can be viewed at: http://www.beechwoodfilms.com/upcoming-films/apprentice/apprentice-graphic-novel/
