Posts

Showing posts from April, 2014

Drawing Table Tuesday

Image
I've said more than once that I hate the computer side of this stuff, so as often as I can I try to get by with real life  world equivalents. So, this is what toning the book looks like. It's faster and less arduous laying flats like this than with a mouse or a tablet. This is one of those things that I do that doesn't resemble anything anyone else does- thinking about it briefly though, I'm okay with that. It seems it would make the process, and consequently the end result, unique. Here 's what a whole page looks like. That's also how I've been coloring things. At first I was worried that this would use too much tracing paper and, in the end, be too expensive. But nope. I've been using a cheap roll of it and I'm still on the same roll. And I've used a lot of the stuff. About  Drawing Table Tuesday .

Blugh.

Image
For all this color stuff I made a color chart based on real (old) color sheets. I referenced about ten old color sheets separators used on old printings and came up with the 63 basic colors (64, counting the faux black). They're aut hentic- because of printing limitations they were pretty much the only colors printed for decades, and it wasn't until the 90's computer coloring boom that color sheets like that became obsolete. After coloring a few of these, I'm starting to feel the limitations. I still like coloring like this, but there are a lot of similar colors. Half of them look like the same color, then half of the remaining look like the other remaining half. There are probably about 15 actual different colors.  There are two browns, neither a very good brown. It's challenging trying to get what you want out of them. Like, if you want a tan color, there isn't one, you have to use the surrounding colors to make a purple look like it's tan. Be

Being Stupid

Image
I stumbled upon this a while ago and I was reminded of school. I think crap like this is stupid. This sort of thing isn't even supposition. Not a single shred of evidence that this was intentional exists. "But look at it, it can't be a coincidence!" Oh yeah? It just looks like it fits. People see what they want and add depth that's not there*. That was something that I felt like fighting all the time in school- you have no idea what they were thinking or what they intended, why   how can you possibly assume it was some sort of amazing, hidden meaning or idea behind it, or they used some sort of amazing mysterious system they never talked about or bothered to write down or record in any way? *This is how we get people that swear they saw Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster instead of actually seeing the empty trash bag that blew by. Basically, the same principle that makes us interpret this as a face. I'm all for over analyzing some things, bu

More Colorin'

Image
There wasn't really a way to crop an interesting section of this without revealing too much, but this does happen to have some hard to reproduce printing errors. They're not hard to reproduce technically , like, know-how, they're hard to pinpoint exactly what you want to reproduce and then remembering to go out of your way to put it there later. It's also hard to make intentional errors look unintentional. Adam Savage explains the idea pretty well whenever he talks about weathering props.  I remember reading an interview with Katsuhiro Otomo and he was talking about a time when he had to arrange three rocks- he kept trying different arrangements all day, but they kept looking staged and unnatural. As a last ditch effort, he just threw them up in the air and they landed perfectly. Point being, intentionally unintentional things are very hard to pull off. The key is something like loud subtlety. There's a streak of magenta and some drips of yellow.

Colorin'

Image
I'm pretty happy with how these lines came out. I tried to get those ghost smudges in the lines on this one*. It's had to reproduce errors non-uniformly. I thought this one came out pretty well, but I won't know for sure until the test proof I had printed gets here. It's been my experience, that blacks print about a hundred times darker than they look on screen, so those blacks should print black enough. This looks great at 600ppi, but I'm not sure what normal photo printers print at, or at least, how well they print it. I'm not sure if the fake printing errors are exaggerated enough to show up well when it's printed and they're all twice as small. Right now though, I feel that if this looks just like high quality scans of real printed stuff, then it should look just like those when it's printed the same size they are to begin with. But I guess we'll see. Also, I'm totally not making that show. I'm okay with that though. I'

Money shot

Image
Here's the latest scan (that I flipped to see if there's anything wrong with it) . There are a few money shot pages in the book (about 10 or so, I think) and this is one of them. This is a raw, unaltered scan (besides being darkened and flipped) , but it looks like the figure's been photoshopped onto the page from another drawing. But it wasn't.  Also, I think this gives a false impression of the book. It's not really a superhero book. I don't think, anyway. Eh, maybe it is. P.S. I keep meaning to make longer posts about specific things, but every time I go to, I don't remember what I meant to say.

Drawing Table Tuesday

Image
This is this page. A few things on this page have changed on the final drawing. That archway wasn't drawn there in an earlier page, so I just ended up not drawing it.  I've got a cover to draw, then I start inking. I've got the last third (or quarter, I don't remember off hand) of the book to thumbnail, so I'll probably work on those intermittently between inking this stack of pages. Inking goes fast, though. This would be the first book if they weren't ultimately being printed as one, big, trade book. I was a little sloppy with the page counts (because I put in what I thought was needed instead of trying to hit page a count) , but if they were printed as smaller, normal length comic books, the page counts for the six books are between 18 and 32. That's about normal, I think. I'm pretty sure I'll have a few dummy copies printed along the way as I hit those page counts. Just to have something to look at, and, I think it'll seem a lot

Drawing Table Tuesday

Image
There's nothing on the table right now but a blank sheet with pale blue ink too light to take a picture of, so here's a drawing I scanned yesterday. It's sort of related to my secret project , but very watered down. It's the fifth drawing in the series, but it's sort of the #0 in the set. Doesn't fit quite in, but close enough to slip it in anyway. I'm not too sure how serious she was, but Staci said she wanted me to put one of these in an upcoming show. An Earth Day show, I think? I don't know, I don't have facebook. But if I had to show one, it would be this one. I might. The deadline's coming up soon, so I might finish it in time, but I might not. I'm gonna try to anyway. Coloring it will take a while because I'm still unfamiliar, and, still trying to get a consistent process. I don't want these to take more of my time than they're worth; they're always secondary, more for practice and warming up for real drawings, e