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Here are a few more things I did last year while developing the comic pitch.

The inking on this was inspired by John Buscema. done with a round brush in phothshop with some size pressure sensitivity.

This was one of my first attempts to get more into painting as opposed to line and colour.

The book ended up being planned as painted backgrounds with line art for the characters, but I prefer to concept with a looser process.

So, as I have been typing about here for the last year or two; I have been working on a comic project all of my own. Writing a fantasy story, as has been my want since I first started to read…even before I started to draw in fact. I spent some of last year concepting out everything I wanted to put in, and the style I wanted to use. But mostly, I was engrossed in learning how to translate story ideas into finished pages.

The proposed project is a series of self contained books. I wrote quite a few drafts of stories that weren’t quite right for the first book, but in the end (with the help my my editor David Chauvel) I found something that worked. It is currently in the contract wrangling phase at a French publisher.

So fingers crossed.

Here are some of the pitch materials:

I re-drew this guy out of curiosity, to see how much my rendering has improved. The original is still one of my favourite designs.

A rough painting of This sketch which was done many many years ago.

Focusing on painting without line.

Similar to the Blue Petal image posted below, this is a style test using line and colour with a painted background. 100% photoshop.

WIP screen shots from last year.

Drawing linework in Photoshop is starting to grow on me

I picked up a copy of John Buscema ‘A life in sketches’ and was musing on how fast this guy managed to be while keeping on-top of quality (especially when he inked his own stuff). His sketches are stunning. And watching the buildup of lines got me thinking that I need to do something similar in the digital realm.

The problem for me drawing in Photoshop has always been that lines get lost when you zoom out. It’s hard to see what you are doing, Hard to get a nice line, and I would always end up with a constrained feeling. Like it’s not possible to see the whole image properly at once, as on a real bit of paper.

Corel Painter is better at this, even when zoomed out you get a fairly decent line, it seems to average the stroke a bit better and smooth things out. but…I just find other aspects of the app to be too painful.

But looking at the broad strokes Buscema sketched with to put his first rough layout down (I think he would do his ‘thumbnails’ at full size, just straight on the board) I figured I could probably ‘sketch’ with something much larger and looser in Photoshop, and then zoom up for the final lines…filling in the details as I go…as you should when inking your own work really. (ok so maybe this is pretty obvious…but for some reason I would always try to draw like I do on paper…with a thin line for sketching)

So I gave this a go, and it actually seems to be working so far. The lines in the above image are all digital, and I think they are probably as good as my pencil stuff. Plus it feels pretty good on the line by line fun-factor basis.

I did this one a few weeks ago, and now I am running into some issues with how to do larger more complex images in this style (lines with painted background) but that has more to do with the painting than the lines. So all good.

I have also been keeping a journal of screenshots each day which I will start posting now and then.

(In lieu of actual tutorials :x)