Redrawing Pages: More Celephais
on November 11, 2011
at 11:13 pm
Who’s redrawing still more of Celephais? Me! Here’s another panel from the upcoming book edition.
Who’s redrawing still more of Celephais? Me! Here’s another panel from the upcoming book edition.
This panel is twice as tall as the one it’s replacing… does this mean that one of the other panels will be gone entirely?
I never noticed it before, but there seems to be a contradiction between the text and the image – form does not exist, and yet the glowing gasses measure the secrets of existence with instruments that have a form.
It’s a nice panel on its own, but I thought the original was quite effective (particularly the way he’s floating and faceless, which emphasizes the alienness of that place) and this seems like a digression from the main story that perhaps isn’t as important as any of the panels that it might replace.
Of course it’s a contradiction between the text and the image, but perhaps they’re spiritual compasses and microscopes. -_- Or perhaps I just couldn’t think of any other way to show shapeless intelligent gases without recourse to familiar imagery. Which is the answer? It’s a mystery…
I like the new version of the panel, of course, for many reasons, and I may make a small change to the previous page to make it fit in better.
I like the way it’s drawn better (it’s definitely superior in terms of “technique”), but I like the conception of the original panel more.
To outline my reasons:
In the new version, the physicality and REALITY of the place is underlined by the fact that our protagonist is standing on a flat surface, and by the gases being shown using physical tools. In the original, he’s floating and faceless (which signifies a transcendence of self & physicality) and although the same sorts of measuring instruments are present (rulers, protractors), they are floating in space rather than shown being directly used by the gases, so the possibility is left open that this is merely his way of interpreting what he is seeing through the concepts that he’s familiar with. By making it more explicit what is actually going on, the magic and ambiguity is removed.
Well, and also I can’t imagine any of the panels around it being removed to make room for it – they all seem to be really important to the story.
By the way, the new page from your latest Kickstarter update is really beautiful!
If you’re still doing small corrections, the index finger of the guy who’s pointing at the city in the panel before is tilted at a weird angle – perhaps that can be fixed without too much redrawing…