Tuesday 1 April 2014

Hellboy development work


Some people really like the occasional look at the process.  I was tidying the studio and crumpling the piles of layout bond that accumulate and realised there was stuff worth scanning and sharing.  Some of the material was already too crumpled to scan well, but the remainder.

I generally start everything with a pile of sketches of the main characters get to get the look into my hands.  Then I usually do 10-20 thumbnail sketches of layout ideas -- often with a thick pencil or marker to keep details from slowing me down.  I reduce the thumbs to two or three 'good' ideas, then do three or more pencil sketches developing those and then run with my favourite.  I then do sketches of the 'parts' of the image - -foreground, background and figures can often all be on their own pieces of paper.  Sometimes they're drawn at a comfortable size instead of a similar size to how they'll fit on the image -- tiny figures might be drawn 200% larger to better capture form and gesture. for example.  The lot gets scanned, manipulated, cleaned up and assembled in Photoshop.  The result isn't what I would have considered finished pencils a few years ago, I save about 25% of the finishing in the drawing for the inks so i'm not just tediously tracing over my pencils.  I convert the image to 22% Cyan and print it out on the art board.  The rest is ink and white paint.

No comments: