Work Process, Early November

I'm trying to slog to the end of my current big project. I'll be done with it by the end of November if it kills me. That still doesn't prevent hiccups from happening.

This piece is described as basically barbarians vs. giant plasma monsters, with some other game-specific instructions like what weapon the barbarian woman is holding and such. The under-drawing was quick (I did it while I was chatting with a friend on Google+ as it so happens):

Detailed, eh? Most of the fun comes in the inking stage. Here's the inked drawing. I didn't like the trailing figure, so I drew a the archer instead as I inked it:

But this drawing has a couple of problems. One is an inking accident in the lower part of the drawing on the feet and legs of the two male barbarians. You can see the white paint on the thigh of the archer that I used to cover the smear there, and there's another smear under the left foot of the swordsman. Additionally, the aspect ratio is wrong. The size of the space this fits in in the final book is 2.6:5, so it's too narrow. You can also see the edge of the paper on the left side of the drawing. To the Photoshop! I corrected the contrast to get rid of the page tone of the paper, plus the stray pencil strokes that I failed to erase, I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of the ink smears, and I widened the image and extended the landscapes. These I just drew directly with my Wacom tablet (why am I not working digitally on this project? I'm not fast with digital tools, or, at least, not noticeably faster than I am with traditional materials, which I like). Here's the final version I sent to the client:

This next drawing went off without a hitch. The image popped into my mind and the drawing went very quickly. For inspiration and reference, I looked at bunch of photographs of dancers in a production of "The Rite of Spring" choreographed by Pina Bausch. This will be reproduced in a tiny space, so a lot of detail would get lost, so this is fairly simple:

Belatedly, the client suggested that I cover the naughty bits. This surprised me a bit, because the other books in this series don't shy away from harder material and this book has plenty of gore in it. There's a dancer pulling her face off in this image, after all. But, that's fine. I'm a very compliant collaborator most of the time. Again: to the Photoshop! My client suggested fur bikinis for these figures, but I didn't like that idea, so I went with something a little more civilized:

This is ultimately an example of the practice of drawing a naked figure and then drawing clothes on top of them, which is well-familiar to artists of comics. Anyway, I'm pushing through this. Here's a bonus image, one that went through more or less without a hitch, though it's more "sketch-like" than most of the other stuff I've done for this project. The dinosaur is modeled on the skeleton of a giganotosaur, and you can't actually see the tail of the beastie in the reference and I didn't draw it on the page, so I added it in Photoshop after I scanned it because I thought the drawing looked odd without it. I like the dynamism of this image:

Enjoy.

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Dream Date With Doctor Doom WIP

I signed up to participate in a zine wrangled by my friend, Tenebrous Kate. The premise is "Dream Dates with Fictional Villains." I picked Doctor Doom. The original title was to be "Doom Does Not Engage in Foreplay," but I also thought about "Foreplay is for the Fool, Richards!" The title is still in flux. Anyway. This is my elaborate scripting process. This is actually more than I often do when scripting comics. A lot of the time, I use stick figures. Anyway. This is pencil on a stray comic book backing board, which I find is the ideal surface for doing thumbnails for comics.

Process

Here's another drawing for my current RPG commission. I thought I'd throw in a work in process scan to give you an idea of how I go about making pictures. I drew this in pencil on a piece of bristol board. Mostly, I just blocked in the shapes and tried to get the anatomy of the beastie right. I don't start thinking about details until I start inking. In this case, this critter was described as a chameleon, able to change colors like an octopus, and in the game it's practically invisible. This is not easy to draw, and I haven't managed it, really. Black and white isn't really conducive to this, but it did give me the idea for the skin patterns while hiding in tall grasses. I ink with a brush these days, which is still kind of amazing to me. Inking with a brush used to seem like voodoo to me, particularly when I would look at people like Berni Wrightson (who drew his astonishing Frankenstein illustrations with a brush). Necessity drove me to brushes rather than the crowquills I used to favor and now I'm completely comfortable with them. Practice makes perfect, I guess.


Anyway, this was fun.

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I'm trying out Patreon as a means of funding my blogs. They don't have a widget yet, so this link will just have to do. If you like my writing and art and if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.

Ol' One Eye

This is a work in progress. The client wanted a drawing of Odin with his ravens and wolves, but didn't want him in a warrior aspect. Research told me that he was going to need a big hat, but I didn't want a hat that would make him look like Gandalf. The outfit is based on a Viking coat from Birka, while his belt buckle is patterned after the great buckle from the Sutton Hoo ship burial. It doesn't look very "viking" by the popular imagination, but this is actually pretty heavily researched. The hat, I admit, I kitbashed from a couple of historical sources and probably doesn't resemble anything real. In truth, I'm tired of drawing fur. I've drawn a lot of it this year. Check back when this is finished, by which time, I'll be tired of drawing snowy branches.

Back to Work

Finally back to work on The Exile. (Actually, I've been at it for days, but I'm finally getting my groove back). Plus, my super-cramped work space. I really need to organize my workspace better. Lots of fiddly perspective on this page, which is part of why I've lingered so long on it. Tighter pencils than usual, but I find that I ink better when the pencils are tighter. I'm digging the inking process right now, which is new. I used to dread inking, but now it's the pencils that are the make-work. In any event, I hope to push this story through to being done relatively soon. End of April is my goal. Sooner would be better. Some dumb freelance job is probably going to screw that up, though, so no promises.

Ivanna and the Wolf WIP

This is Ivanna and the Wolf, a Rule 63 version of an old Russian folk tale. This is for a role-playing game a friend of mine has written. It's about a third done right now. I wanted to do something very different from the usual woman warrior fantasy art I see. This almost has more in common with fashion illustration. Anyway, this is an excuse to make lots of fun textures in ink. This was drawn with a number 2 Windsor and Newton watercolor brush in sumi ink on Bristol board over red col-erase Prismacolor. I'm probably going to make prints of this for sale in my Etsy store once it's done.

Revenge panel 3 WIP

This is a panel from a comic I'm working on (I hope to finish it tomorrow or Tuesday). This is still a work in progress so I haven't bothered to drop out the col-erase pencils in Photoshop. I'm particularly pleased with how this is turning out, so I wanted to share it. It almost looks like I know what I'm doing.

I'm hoping to coax the rest of this from my failing Pitt brush pens. I need new ones. This isn't going to be as filthy as this panel suggests it will get. I would post this on Facebook, but I suspect it violates their terms of service, so I guess not.

Jess Model Sheet

This is a character model sheet. I'll eventually do 20 or thirty of these drawings for each of the characters in the comic I'll be drawing in a few weeks. Doing the grunt work early before I actually have to produce pages. This is Pitt brush pen over pencil on crappy Caslon sketchbook paper.

Luchador 1

This is a work in progress for a commission job I got this week. Of all the things I ever expected to draw, a luchador in an Elmer Fudd hat is not one of them. Ah, the glorious life of an illustrator...

Pitt pen over red col-erase Prismacolor.

Gini's Big Date WIP

This is for Tenebrous Kate. What I'm working on in process. This is the first page of a long narrative (probably about forty pages). A graphic novella, as it were. This is a vector created with Adobe Illustrator. This will be color when I'm done. I'm being slow with this, actually.

Ms. 45, first proof

Okay. Here's the finished version of Ms.45. This is a proof, but I'm done working the block, so this is what the edition will look like. The image area is 8x6 inches and it's printed on Kozu paper.

Anyway, this is basically a get my feet wet sort of piece to get me used to working on linoleum. Not great, but I'm not embarrassed by it, either. My next piece will be more ambitious and hopefully more confident.

The edition will go onto my Etsy shop on Friday.

Edit: it's live.

Ms.45 Linocut, Take 2

Okay, so I'm progressing on this. Here's a video I made this morning:



I hope to have prints in the Etsy store by the end of the week. Wish me luck.

Ms.45 Linocut WIP

So, I have a bunch of linoleum blocks right now. I don't have much experience with linocut--I specialized in intaglio printmaking when I was in art school--but I don't need a press to pull linocut prints and I need something substantial to put in my Etsy store. Over the weekend, I made a drawing based on a still from the movie, Ms.45, and transferred it to a block yesterday:

Today, I carved the block:

Unfortunately, I don't have any good paper for relief printing. I ordered some Rives lightweight paper from Blick this morning and now I'm waiting. I suppose I could pull a print with some cheap sketchbook paper, but I hate the idea of wasting the ink on that. I guess I'm waiting on the mail now. In the mean time, I downloaded plans for a relief printing press made from some two by fours and a hydraulic jack. I think I have a project for the summer.