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2 & 3
4 & 5
6 & 7
8 & 9
10 & 11
12 & 13
14 & 15
16
THE PROJECT
After visiting Barcelona, especially Casa Amatller, I returned to Portugal with a renewed interest in Art Nouveau, particularly in lamps.
For a Digital Drawing class in university, we were required to do a project with a theme and software of our choice, completely free, as long as it was done digitally.
I wrote this story to allow myself to have fun drawing lamps for 6 months. It was a challenge, I had never written such a large story, had never spent so much time in one single project and had never drawn digitally without using line art.
It is a simple story, about curiosity and stubbornness that allowed me to explore and spend a lot of time with each drawing, to give it as much detail as possible.
The pages were drawn and painted in Procreate and assembled and edited in Photoshop.
Below you will be able to see a few examples of the storyboard, the initial character sheet (that suffered quite a few alterations, especially in the colour scheme), additional pages and photographs of the printed comic. ↓
THE STORY
We meet a lamp maker in his workshop who is disrupted by a star-flame that he captures and uses as a light.
In a flashback we learn that, as a child a similar flame had convinced him to follow it into the woods. This resulted in him losing the very first lamp he made with his parent's help and running home very scared.
In the present, the man has captured too many flames. The parental figure of these little flames appears to try to make him to release them, but can only convince the man in following it to the forest. This time, he leaves a trail of light from the star-flame lit lamps.
The big flame leads him to the clearing where he lost the first lamp and, lighting it with a candle, returns it to the man, trading it for his newest lamp and the releasing of the little ones, saying "We need something of yours to find you again. Release the flames on your way back home, please. They have beautiful places to show you."
In an epilogue, the man's first lamp is hung above his door. When the candle is put out by the wind, a small star-flame comes to light it again.
storyboard example: page 1
storyboard example: pages 2 and 3
initial character sheet
printed version
printed version
inside cover page
inside back cover page
cover