Jason Badower/The Death of Hana Gitelman, Part 2

This article is a stub. You can help by expanding it. In particular, this article needs commentaries from Jason's blog for the rest of the blank images.

Jason Badower shares his original art and comments about his work on The Death of Hana Gitelman, Part 2.

• 
  "This was one of my favourite pages of the whole series. First up, it's totally different to everything else. Aron's script jumps scenes faster than a video clip, yet is held together by a narrative tighter than Noah's love for Claire."
• 
  "In panel 3, I wanted you to believe with her that for a split second she can fly. That an umbrella and faith will hold you aloft despite the unimaginative laws of gravity and physics."
• 
  "My main goal was to communicate a child-like sense of wonder without dismissing the danger. I'm especially happy with the picture of the young Hana in panel 1. I don't often draw children, and I think she looks great, and she has real personality to me. As I joked in an earlier post, 'I just drew the cutest kid... EVER.'"

• 
  Jason draws the outline for page 2.
• 
  "Drawing three totally different Jewish people was fun and interesting. I wish they were somebody as they would probably be nice portraits."
• 
  "My main effort was spent trying to adjust the colours so as we moved forward through each flashback the colours became more vibrant and familiar."

• 
  "It's funny, but for a guy so well versed in action (ex stunt man and black belt martial artist) I'm terrible at comic book action. Laying out this page was akin to pulling teeth."
• 
  "It's almost impossible to communicate all this action in one image. I drew sketch after sketch of the possible layouts, finally being drawn towards this image. It contains what I call 'implied action'. I don't know what she's doing to move the two bald guys (3rd and 4th from left) but it just works. She emanates a convincing energy that makes you believe that something has happened by the sheer power of her movement."
• 
  "Remember, most fights are a series of quick, quick cuts to communicate the action. Imagine that each cut is a panel - a separate image that needs to be depicted. You're looking at close to 100 cuts or more for your average small Jackie Chan fight scene. That's 100 panels or around 20 pages... for a SMALL fight scene. That means you just shelled out $2.95 for what would be a minor fight scene.... Basically a waste of your money as it doesn't progress the plot at all."

• 
  "I know a lot of people are going to snicker that it's because I was drawing a woman undressing. That's only accurate on a very superficial level. The naked body is (arguably) one of the easiest things to draw from a technical level. It's also the first thing most artists learn to draw. It's why life drawing the naked figure is recommended as one of the best ways to improve one's drawing. So it stands to reason that the (semi) naked figure is where I'm going to be able to mentally go back to basics and re-evaluate this style."
• 
  "After I had drawn the lineart, I layered underneath a black and white page of ink wash splatters. I would then tone that layer using the Burn and Dodge tool in Photoshop. As I mentioned, it was a nice technique, but it was kinda... rough."
• 
  "When you've made progress in your craft, sometimes you can look over your shoulder and realize that all the baby steps have taken you a mile. Sometimes, just sometimes you can point to one page, perhaps one image as the key point where you stepped up to another level. Panel 4 is that image for me."

• 
  "This is an interesting page. It's all smoke and mirrors, and everything I've drawn you don't actually get to see!"
• 
  "I quite like the top panel, I like Hana's expression. It speaks of a subtle trepidation. While I think it's a decent likeness, it's hard to create an exact image of someone when you can't see their hair!"
• 
  "As you can see, the top page is actually fairly detailed. I put a significant amount of work into the background. I think it's because I knew that the rest of the page would be all cutting corners."
• 
  "This second panel could have been so much more beautiful and epic. I'm not sure what got lost. Perhaps the scale? Some trucks or people in the foreground would have really helped the scale of it. As it is, it looks a bit like a Thunderbirds mission."

• 
  "[The] last tough thing was Hana's infection by the computer virus. Again, if you look closely into her red eyes, you can see the words of data/text in the whites of her eyes. I took artistic license drawing the blood trickling down (we all know there's no gravity in space) but I couldn't think how to make it work any other way."
• 
  "As you can see by the lineart, there is a great deal going on in the background that is not present on the final painted page. In the past when I have worked with Annette, she has been reluctant to place in effects or layers which would cover up the linework that I had drawn. I would ask her to do what the story requires. If I had over-drawn an area, then that's my fault. As is obvious in this case. You can see all the background that I drew - the chairs, the monitors and the background textures and details. But I decided that the 'tech cloud' should be all encompassing and dominating. I also used it as a means to make Hana stand out more. "
• 
  "For such a low-key show like Heroes, a bolt of lightning from someone's head was going to look incongruous. But I realized I had very little choice. I tried to overlap the technical data into the lightning bolt to make it look like a technical signal. If you look, the 'forcefield' is made of red data. I think Aron's captions really helped here."

• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Notes about Jason's drawings are taken from his weblog.