The Famous Flower of Serving Men

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Overview:

Based on the 17th century ballad by Laurence Price, ‘The Famous Flower of Serving Men’ is a tale that deals with betrayal, murder, spite, revenge, love, loss and healing. This project’s brief was simply to produce a comic, any comic, with complete freedom regarding where I might to take it. As myths and legends have always been a passion of mine, especially those of old England and the lands of the Celts, for my comic, I turned to my collection of ancient ballads. Eventually I selected this one for its completeness of tale and themes still relevant to modern audiences. As the tradition of this ballad was undoubtedly oral at first, there is no official original version and so, to recover a full storyline, I collated all the versions I could find. From there I expanded the tale so that the flow remained coherent, rewrote the script to suit a modern day audience and added characters to produce a cohesive and complete story, while still remaining as true to the original plot as possible. My first stages included sketching characters and ideas for scenes. This quickly grew into a full scale rough draft. Much effort was put here into ensuring that the layout on the page helped to develop and add to the story, working alongside the actual frames and their contents. Following this, I sketched and drew the final comic by hand on A4 paper using pigment liners, brush and ink. This was scanned and cleaned up digitally then compiled to produce the final piece.