There's never a perfect place to begin an unfinished story.
So, diving right in, lets see some art.
This was part of a page I did in college, after reading a little about Will Eisner's "dirty water" technique. It's an easy technique that can allow the artist a lot of control over light without reliance on heavily spotted blacks. It would influence much of my later work.
When composing this page, I wanted to tell a simple story, someone having a cup of coffee, and how it made them feel. Three wide panels with two insets.
The three wide panels establish the story, at least as I saw it then. The morning ritual of preparing, pouring, then enjoying coffee. The two insets being close up facial reactions showing the human side of the story.
The two inset panel shapes took some consideration. I wanted them to convey a little something extra without hitting you in the face too terribly hard. So, knowing the western eye views everything from left to right, like how we read, I simply narrowed the first one, to imply a narrow outlook coming from the already grim and grumpy expression within. The second, with the coffee kicking in and life looking good, widens. A pretty simple trick that was fairly effective and wasn't terribly distracting.
I also wanted light to play a part, and it remains dark throughout, until the last panel, which is full of light, silhouetting the protagonist who is facing the day ahead, now that he has had his fix.
It's a solid page, but if I were to do it again, the first wide panel would have been a little earlier in the process of making the coffee, maybe grinding beans or something along those lines. Punch up the anticipation a bit more so the payoff feels a bit more important. I would have used an espresso machine, something more visually appealing to look at, done a little more research, looked a little further than my own kitchen for a model. I'm sure ten years from now, I will have a lot more problems with it, the road to perfection, mastery of the craft, it's a long one.
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