Almost everything could use improving. The grass looked flat, the bushes looked like little spike animals, the rocks looked like melting ice cream and the mountains looked like giant sand dunes. Pretty much the only things I was happy with were the town, the clouds and the ocean. And that van, Christ that van.
Most of the comics I've done thus far have relied on super stylized backgrounds that took forever to draw, stuff like The King of the Cats and The Vacant Lot. I'm actually trying to evoke a real place with this comic, though, so I had to teach myself how to draw landscape for real, rather than relying on hundreds of tiny blades of grass and tree branches to fudge it.
I always liked how Craig Thompson drew fields of grass, so cribbed a bit from him on this page.
This one's trying to figure out the techniques Eric Shanower uses to create the wonderfully epic landscapes he uses.
And here's the redrawn version. The new van's still a bit off to me. It kind of looks like it's floating above the road, rather than driving along it. But still, I'm getting closer to the look I want for this comic.
