Pastiche Comic: Doug TenNapel

Though Visual Storytelling 1 was my only studio class this quarter, I still had the opportunity to draw more comic pages. Survey of Sequential art has been a fascinating look into comics history. It's classes like these that make me so glad I chose this major.

Outside of class, we were to research a comics artist of our choice, put together a presentation, and then draw a single-page comic imitating his/her style and subject matter.

I chose Doug TenNapel, an artist I'm been enamored with since I was a kid. I grew up watching the Earthworm Jim cartoon and had more recently come across his webcomics Ratfist and Nnewts. He's an amazingly prolific artist with an incredible resume of working in animation, comics, and video game development. Not only is he hilarious and talented, but he's also an ambitious man of faith. I truly admire how he incorporates his passion for Christ in his work, most notably in graphic novels like Ghostopolis and Creature Tech. He's definitely an inspiration.

For my project, I came up with a story that followed TenNapel's reoccurring themes of curiosity, family, and amphibious creatures. If you don't believe me, check out his stuff, it's pretty rad. My story is of a son leading his father into the swamp to share his secret discovery of ancient amphibious diplocaulus (my class affectionally dubbed them "frog-puppies").

As far as the artwork goes, I inked using his tool of trade, a Winsor Newton Series 7 brush. I also included a panel mimicking his signature inverted silhouette style.



THUMBNAILS:

TIGHT ROUGHS/REVISIONS:

FINAL PIECE:

I don't do the guy justice, but this was such a fun assignment to do. It was a great opportunity to not only study another artist closely, but learn more about a personal hero.

Yeah, man!