Recently I’ve been thinking that I should add an antagonist to to act as a foil for one of my characters, Gerald the Goat, who tends to get a bit out of order and could do with someone to keep him in check from time to time.
At first I introduced a bull character who would chase Gerald around. However, bulls and goats are natural enemies, and so Ithought i would be more interesting to add an antagonist with more of an element of danger about them. Leopards eat goats, and so I came up with the idea of having a snow leopard occasional escape from the local zoo to bug Gerald.
After drawing the leopard in a few strips, I thought it would be fun to come up with some sort of origin story, just like you get with all the superheroes. While I havent yet delved back into the remote mountains of Afghanistan where the leopard hails from, I thought I’d start off at the zoo and see what happens from there.
Exploring ideas doodles
Here are some really rough doodles from when I started playing around with the idea.
Mindmap
I decided to put together a mindmap to go over some possible ideas. I colourcoded it for ease of reference.
The first idea I settled on was the leopard getting bored and attacking something in its enclosure.
Outline Sketch
After settling on the idea, I did a rough outline sketch of how the strip would look. I used a digital 6B pencil. Using a pencil, whether a real one or digital, always feels more sketch and those I like the looseness of it when working out an idea.
Reference point picture
I used a previous pictures of the leopard as a reference point, so that all the different poses would be consistent.
The Four Poses
Here are the four poses of the leopard that will appear in the strip. I copied and modified the above reference picture for all of them, apart from the last one of it chewing on the boot.
Laying out the strip
Each image of the leopard is on a separate layer. I addedthe overall frame and also the lines to divide up the panels, also on separate layers, to act as guidelines.
I moved the images around until I was happy with the look, and then erased any overlapping. I then tidied up the panel frames.
Adding washes
I applied the washes using the wash in Procreate, set at 30% opacity and then built up the darker tones.
Adding shadow
I again used the wash to add the shadow using the characters. You’ll seen that in the last panel I haven’t yet finished it.
Adding the speech and finishing off the cartoon.
I wrote all the speech on a separate layer, and then moved it around until happy with the layout. I then added the speech bubbles in the last panel.
Finally, I added some movement lines for the leopard.
To be continued…
The leopard is still stuck in the zoo, so next I have to figure out how to break her out of there, so that she can go onto harass Gerald.
What’s next
Coming up in April is the ‘Storytelling for Cartoon Strips Course’, where I show how to use simple story structures in cartoon strips. If you’re curious to find out more, add your name and best email address to the form below, and type ‘spot’ inthe subject line.
