Dragon Mini-Con

This Saturday I'll be one of the guests at The Dragon in Guelph, Ontario ( link ) for their Dragon Mini-Con.

The fine folks of The Dream Detective Media Properties have provided me with a few copies of the limited remaining Pashanata/Dream Detective comics. Earlier entries in my blog show some of my work for that book. I think the plan is to use them to raise some funds for the Hero Initiative in some combo with a sketch.

If I can find the time between now and leaving Saturday morning I might be able to do something with this:

She's Jill, the main character from a long-in-development project I've been working on. Hopefully finished environment pencils, inks and colors aren't out of the question by Saturday morning.

One more Awake page

Thought I'd share another page from the NYCC exclusive promo comic for the ARE YOU AWAKE web TV project.

Thumbs.

Coming back to the page the first panel in the thumbs reminded me of the famous Raquel Welch cavewoman image, so I decided to actually draw her in the first panel.

There were a few overlays for this page, but the motion comic aspect was abandoned, so I'll not bother sharing those scribblely bits.

Of course, such borrowing should be acknowledged, so the not-so-subtle "Raquel" gets scribbled into the water by her right leg

And here's the final colors and letters.

This was a fun project with great people to work with despite some weird production stoppages that almost blew the NY release date and cut into the time I was actually able to work on this.

More Awake comics

A little more behind the curtain production stuff from the comic that was given away at NYCC and available free online here: http://www.areyouawake.tv/ .

I drew all the roughs for this in Photoshop. As much as I like pencil and paper, I find the features in Photoshop allow me to work faster and make radical changes with little effort. I used to draw these in marker or pencil, so another benefit is I can even think in colour at this stage. Since I wasn't coloring it, I limited the use of colour to indicate the various narrative states in the comic: essentially present, flashback and dream.

I wasn't originally supposed to ink this, but that didn't work out. The new need to work faster did allow me to try out some things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Since I was inking over the blue-line printouts I realised I could just as easily have some of the elements print out black as well and ink over that. So elements created in Photoshop or Sketchup could be dropped in next to things drawn in blue and modified on the board with various pens or brushes.

Oh yeah, this was originally supposed to be a motion comic, so parts of nearly every page had to be drawn and inked separately then assembled in layers. I'm not a big fan of motion comics, so I'm moderately happy that didn't end up happening, but I would have laid out a few pages differently had this been the plan all along.

I think I could have drawn in black and converted to non-photo blue, but I didn't. No idea why it didn't occur to me at the time.

Here're the inks -- well, most of them for this page.

And the rest of them

The page assembled.

And the page lettered and coloured.

It's a strange experience to see someone else's colours on my work since that never really happens to me anymore. It's difficult for me to judge these objectively since the colours are applied and used so very differently from how I approach them -- or how I saw them in my mind's eye while I drew them. The feedback has been generally positive, so that's cool!

I start playing with digital tones and textures almost immediately after this page, so I might show another page process in a few days.

Are you Awake?

So I drew over half of a flip-comic late this summer and it was given away recently at the New York Comic Con. It was a media promotion book in advance of a new web series -- you can see and read the whole thing here:

http://www.areyouawake.tv/

Typical of promotional comics there were a number of weird hurdles and stops and starts to deal with, but I'm generally pretty happy with the result even though much ended up being rushed and the basic fact that I'm usually only close to ever being satisfied when I'm doing everything.

I drew and colored the cover, designing the images to bleed into each other a bit but still maintain a certain strength and covers on their own.

The roughs were drawn in Photoshop -- something I'm doing more of lately.

I decided to try penciling the covers in Pshop as well. I printed the drawing onto 2-ply bristol after converting the image into a 25% cyan -- essentially non-photo blue.

Inks were just the same old application of pen and brush.

The work was scanned and colored in photoshop. I think i used more colour holds than I ever have before. I liked what I was able to play with here and plan to experiment further.

Here's the cover flipped so you can see it both ways.

I'll probably post more from the interiors over the next little while -- hope you guys find this interesting.

Diagonals!

Had a frustrating day introducing 2-point perspective, but I was actually quite surprised at what seemed to be tripping some of these students up. It's a pretty simple concept -- at least I think it is -- but I thought it might be a good idea to put the relevant info together either to make a handout (which I think promotes intellectual laziness) or a web resource of some sort (which may still inspire some students to be less mentally disciplined, but may save me from explaining the same concept weeks after it was initially introduced).

If this proves useful I might end up doing my whole curriculum in this manner and start a site or blog just to host it as a resource.

So, here's my primer on rectangles and diagonals in perspective.

Note:

The code for this entry got horribly messed up as I uploaded some corrections so I deleted the previous version and just put it up as a new entry -- sorry about the lost comments as a result.

Also, I seemed to have glossed over it in the original: this isn't a full perspective lesson by any means and much of the above info could be quite confusing to anyone not aware of the terminology and set up I'm using with my students.

~R