Bosh & Bill—Bosh and Bill: The Plan

Bosh and Bill: The Plan

by C.K. Sample III | Feb 11, 2010

I've been accumulating things to help me work on art digitally (and therefore have enough room to work at all) over the past several years. In Christmas of 2008, I received a Wacom Cintiq 12WX from my wife, after getting myself a HP tx2500z tablet PC with Adobe CS3 earlier in that same year. I've made this Windows tablet my art computer (which is a bit odd, since I work day in and day out on an iMac and a MacBook), but the main thing here is that it is a dedicated art computer. Sure I can use it to check email in a pinch, but it's basically hooked up to my Wacom 12WX, serving as a dedicated Photoshop, Illustrator, and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro machine. This is very useful for someone like me who normally works online, as it makes me focus on drawing and cartooning on this dedicated machine rather than always having the distraction of my email, my IM, and social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

In Christmas of 2008, I also received Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel & Matt Madden. I started to go through the book and was even in the beginning stages of forming a nomad group, but nothing ever happened with it. I simply didn't have the characters or story idea yet that would keep me focused on learning to be a better comic artist. So I put working through the book on hold, and proceeded to simply draw, sketch, and doodle for a year.

And then, early this year, I drew Bosh and Bill for the first time. I also received several books that had been on my Amazon Wish List, including Scott McCloud's Making Comics, HiFi Color for Comics by Brian & Kristy Miller, Alan Moore's Writing for Comics, Working Methods by John Lowe, The Marvel Encyclopedia, The DC Comics Encyclopedia, and perhaps most importantly, The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics by Freddie E. Williams II.

All of these books are great for their own reasons, but I think the latter really grabbed me with how little it had to do with how to draw and how much it focused carefully on establishing a viable workflow for your drawing that is geared towards producing comic books. It's very focused on Photoshop and even shows you how to create your own Master Page Template (like the one that the design for this site is based upon), although if you want to cheat, you can run over to Williams' site and purchase any of the templates he offers for Photoshop. It won't help you be a better artist or cartoonist, but it will help you begin to do something very important: actively draw digitally in multiple layers in Photoshop and condition you to think in terms of roughs, wireframes, inks, repeatable paths, and revision. I read through a good portion of the book on Christmas day after receiving it, and I continued to read it when Christmas was over and i was sitting with my Wacom with Photoshop open, and began to use the actual system outlined in the book. Since then, I've evolved this workflow a bit, choosing to do my initial sketches and layout either on paper on my Moleskine sketchbook or in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, and then bringing the images over into a layer of my Photoshop template where I can begin working, reworking, revising, and refining the artwork.

That's how Bosh and Bill began. I was doodling on some paper, I drew Bill first, but not as an animal with ears. At first he was a chubby little man with hair. Then I erased and reworked until he had ears and a tail and roughly looked like the Bill that you see in the logo of this site. Then I scanned him in to my computer. Then I refined him some in Sketchbook Pro, gave him different expressions, and then suddenly thought: let me try to make a nasty version of him. I drew Bosh. I had the idea that he would be a mean bunny rabbit, and then I thought he'd be the bastard son of the Easter Bunny (or at least the god that the Easter Bunny is derived from). I wrote a post about it on my blog, where I said:

"He’s the half-rabbit half-human demigod (and therefore immortal) bastard child of the Easter Bunny (aka Eostre) and he’s basically chaotic neutral, if not extremely so. The second character is either Bill or Bilge or Bill G. (just some wordplay on Bosh and Bilge), but I’m not sold on that name and would love some input from others on what they think he should be named. I’m not sure what he is (maybe half-man / half-dog but I’m leaning more towards a random forest animal that has mutated). I’d rather this character be the more human, mortal, and cheery, somewhat goofy good character that most readers will identify with (and he’s to be more neutral good like Spider-man, but goofier).

These guys are destined to be an archetypal pairing based on odd couples like Mercier & Camier, Vladimir & Estragon, C3PO & R2D2, Tahei & Matashichi, Laurel & Hardy , etc. with Bosh bordering on becoming sinister like Loki and Bill, or whatever his name will be, bordering on becoming more saintly (and always on the edge of sacrifice) like Baldur. I have already written their initial meeting origin story in rough, and will be drawing that story soon and posting it somewhere.

Since writing this initial post, I've developed the basic rough outline for the origin story of how these two meet a bit more. I also designed this site as a place to discuss the process of working on this comic, the tools I use, and the ways that I'm learning. I intend to discuss the various books I read, many of them mentioned in this post. I'll share publicly any of the exercises I undertake from the books. And I'll also share the roughs, the inks, and the finals of each page of the comic as it comes to fruition. My goal is to teach myself how to tell the story of Bosh and Bill, then tell their story in serialized form on this site, and publish their story within 5 years. That's the plan. I hope you'll join me for the adventure, I hope the words that I write on this site help others who want to get into the comic business, and I hope that you enjoy the story.