Of the potential “rogues gallery” sketches from my last post, the only one that seemed to hold much potential was the lanky knife guy, so I had another go at him and refined him a bit:
Aug 05 2009
Sketchbook 8/5
At some point in Oyster War, I’m gonna have to have a crew of “bad guys,” so I’ve been working a little on that in my sketchbook. I don’t think any of these designs are particularly inspired, but you gotta start somewhere…
Aug 03 2009
Oyster War Splash Page – Inked
Hand… cramping. Must… finish… hatching.
Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve used dip pens rather than brushes for inking, and all the hatching is really running my arm through the wringer. (I pretended today that my worn out arm was the reason I played squash so horribly, but I guess that’s probably not really the case.) Anyway, here’s the inked page. I’m clearly still finding my footing when it comes to this style of rendering. I’d have thought that the parts of the page I did first would be the weakest and the final bits the strongest, but I think I’m still sorting out how all this works by trial and error throughout and as a result there are some strong areas and some weak areas scattered around randomly. I hope by the time I’m done with this first batch of sample pages that I’ll have a pretty consistent dip pen hatching rendering technique.
Jul 30 2009
Oyster War Sample Page Pencils
While it’s true that I’ve not posted anything here for a good while, there’s a compelling reason I’ve not done so: I’ve been hard at work on the initial twelve pages of Oyster War (12 pages of art/15 pages counting flip). I just completed pencils on the pages and am set to start inking this afternoon or tomorrow. The pages have been taking significantly longer than with most of my previous work I think for two reasons: First, the level of detail in backgrounds and environments is much higher than I usually do. Second, I’m working with four–rather than three–tiers of panels since I’m wanting this book to eventually be the same size and shape of those oversize-ish TinTin books. Here’re the pages so far, splayed out on the floor of my studio. I’ll pick a page throughout the process–probably that spread I posted a scan of a while back–and repost it once inked, then when it’s finally colored.
Jul 15 2009
Shade The Changing Man Pinup
Here’s a pinup of Rac Shade, the main character from Steve Ditko’s DC series Shade the Changing Man. I did this as a “thank you” to send to the folks at Hot Sauce Productions who were kind enough to let us screen the recent Jonathan Ross documentary, In Search of Steve Ditko, at Heroes Con ’09. Shade’s color scheme is pretty simple, so I whipped up a quick color version as well:
At some point, I want to do an in-depth post about the whole Shade the Changing Man series, which I think is Ditko’s last great work-for-hire work. Unfortunately, I neglected to spend any time at Heroes rummaging through the 50 cent bins looking for issues seven and eight which I still lack–so, alas my Shade post will have to wait. I did though look through the books I have before drawing this pinup and I was really struck by issue four in particular, which contains some of Ditko’s greatest bizarre, grotesque and abstract imagery. Some of this stuff makes his Dr. Strange work look tame by comparison. Here’s a page from issue four, for example:
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