Friday, March 27, 2009

MSU Comics forum.

Late notice, but for those of you in the Lansing, Michigan area I will be at the Michigan State University comics forum tomorrow (Saturday, March 28) from 11:30 am - 4:30 pm. Check more info here- http://www.comicsforum.msu.edu/

Monday, March 09, 2009

13 Pencils

Not much time to write stuff tonight, but really is that what people want to see? I say "No", anybody can write stuff. What you want to see are rough scribbly and occasionally (often ?) crappy behind the scenes sketches and stuff. So here you be, some of the rough pencil pages for issue 13. Go!

Note on page 1, panel 3 changed a bit on the final art. I like the scope of this panel, but Robert thought it might be better to zoom in so that we could actually SEE the characters. That Kirkman is a smart dude.
Note that on this page a dude gets punched.
These next 2 page spreads were some of the most fun things to draw for the whole issue.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Cover 17 process

Howdy. Cover process time! This cover for me was all about getting the right design. Robert discussed with me what would be happening and his idea for a cover for this issue. Based on this I did sketch A. This sketch came right away and I really liked it and thought it would make a cool 'in your face' cover. But Robert wanted to see something different. So I worked up some other sketches which i didn't like so much. I just couldn't get into them, mainly because I felt I had already solved the design with version A. After discussing these with Robert and letting a little time pass, I came back and did sketches F- H. We agreed on G, and I banged it out. I literally spent more time on the sketches for this cover than I did on the actual drawing of the cover.

As usual I forgot to scan my finished pencils.But the process went like this. I enlarged my sketch to about 4" X 6", tightened up the drawing on another sheet of paper, then I scanned that enlarged it to full comic page size, converted it to light blue color and printed to directly to the comic board. The I added detail and fixed things up a bit in pencil. I inked over that mainly using a brush on the figure and pens on the sword and ground.

After it was inked, I scaned it and using my good friend Photoshop added some color. I love coloring the covers, particularly as I now am no longer coloring the interior pages to the book. My goal is to pick a color scheme that I feel will pop, and make the image stand out.
And that is all.