For the mentor comic book project, I made a comic book panel based off of Lana Del Rey’s National Anthem music video, off her 2012 debut album Born To Die. The video portrays Del Rey as Jacqueline Kennedy and casts A$AP Rocky as John F. Kennedy. Much of the imagery is 1950s Americana related, and there is a scene where Lana is sitting on an animal hide rug, which I recreated in this comic book page.

The first step for creating this comic book page was to create the mock up to draw off of. I also added the text in beforehand so I could get an idea of the placement. I took screenshots of the stills I wanted to use from the music video on YouTube, and used Figma to make the layout. I referenced an issue of Avengers for this page’s layout. I used the font from the single cover, Rainbow off DaFont, to make the title text for the page. The comic book font is called Laffayette Comic Pro, also off of DaFont.

Next was the easy part: drawing and the physical color. I tried to give the drawings a more comic look so that I could play around more with the colors in post production. I used a fine sharpie to outline and did some initial coloring. I then scanned both panels close up and Airdropped them to my laptop.

Next is Photoshop time. The main change that I made in Photoshop was change the background to a very dark grey. It is a lot easier to make object selections and do masking in Photoshop than in Figma, so I decided to do it in a separate application from the rest of the work. I also adjusted some of the lines to make them more black, and removed any smaller imperfections in my pen work.

I finished up in Photoshop with some brightness and contrast changes, and brought everything into Figma, the layout software. First up was recoloring; I added some pink and light purple tones as well as the tiniest bit of yellow to try and emulate the color of the reference, as well as adding some film grain. I decided to keep my borders sharp instead of using a film edge for this project because I wanted to keep a little bit of the comic book integrity in the piece.

All that was left at this point was to drop it into my layout and replace the reference images. Et voila, the finished page.