Sketchbook Moment : Project 1 or "Hounds"

Figured I'd scan a couple more pages out of one of my sketchbooks on a whim. This is some character design stuff from one of my writing / comic / art projects that is, despite being numbered at 1, neither my oldest or newest project. It just was the first one that came to mind when I made the list up ages back for the old version of my hythia.com site.

Anyways, "Hounds" was going to be it's formal name at one point, though it has gone through enough random iterations of the basic background material since it was first concieved that the name is no longer applicable. It originally had to do with my Hattrick team. Hattrick being a free online web game where you manage a soccer club, fun but I lost interest in it about 14 months ago and my team was deleted some time ago due to inactivity.

The story and cast are contemporary and urban. The actual writing and art was and is still intended to be pretty extemporaneous. Basically me writing and drawing about whatever strikes my mood at the time. I had never intended any actual major or deep storylines for the project, mostly experimentation and practice for my other projects.

The basic characters have remained the same throughout brainstorming and idea revisions and the three below are the main male cast members of the comic / story. I can't at the moment locate any of the matching sketches for the female cast members from this same set of drawings, likely they are in a sketchbook that is still boxed up. Artistically, this was a style that was cartoony enough for me to like at the time and be easy and fast to draw in but was still expressive enough that I thought I might be able to write serious bits of story with them. The three design board drawings below are all from a set of sketches done in October of 2003.

  

Since then, I have actually moved on, for this project at least, to something closer to the style below. This is a bit of me playing around with redoing the head and facial design for the first of the three characters to see if I liked it better and how it would or wouldn't work. If nothing else, I like the hair better on this one versus the weird spikey hair style in the first of the three above. This was done in the May of 2004.



All of this is pretty rough work, design work, as can be seen from all my notes on the margins of the drawings and my own personal critique and labelling of the important parts of the designs. I have a handful of half-finished strips in a couple different formats. I never have quite settled or decided on what I would like best, more of a horizontal scroll or flow or more of a vertical sequence of panels or swapping between them depending on mood.

Of all of my comic projects, this will likely be the one that I will get up on the web first as little is holding it back right now except my actually getting in gear and getting inspired enough to finish some pages and ink and scan them up.