Mar 18 2010

Craft: Wide Awake Press FCBD 2010 Cover

As they have for the last few years, the folks a Wide Awake Press are putting out a free dowloadable comic for Free Comic Book Day this year.  For last year’s issue, Ancient, I was–alas–only able to do a spot illustration.  This year, though, I was offered the cover, and of course snapped it up.  This year’s theme is things medieval and magical, and the title is “Jabberwacky.”  After a bit of back and forth with editor J. Chris Campbell, we decided on a basic Jabberwocky -derived image: a knight with a magical sword fending off some sort of giant beast.  For anyone what’s interested, here’s how the process went start to finish:

We’d decided to have the monster be out of the composition and maybe just suggested via shadows and/or a little bit of a claw, tail, or whatnot.  I think Chris had in mind that the knight would be running toward the viewer with the monster behind.  For whatever reason, I instinctively had him facing us with the viewer sort of “cast” as the monster.  Here are my initial thumbnails:

rough_01

rough_02

rough_03

I liked the aerial view (#3), but I thought it made the figure too small and the creature appear too big–so I went with the middle rough above.  It seemed like a good compromise between the first rough which is ground level and framed pretty close to the figure, and that third aerial view.  As is my usual practice these days, I just scanned the rough, enlarged it, turned it all to a light blue, and printed it out to work on further.  I used orange, red, and finally a regular lead pencil to work over the image and tighten it up:

colored_p

At this stage, though, the overall composition was bugging me.  I realized that the source of the problem was that the elements of the scene were forming two nearly-symmetrical  “layers” that were sort of stacked on top of one another in a visually uninteresting way.

colored_p_1

So, after scanning the image, I moved some things around in Photoshop to try to create a more interesting composition.  Once that was completed, I once again turned the whole thing to light blue and then did my final pencil drawing over that.  Here’s the pencil stage both with the compositional changes highlighted and without:

pencils_01

pencils_01a

From this point onward, it was a fairly straight-ahead process.  I’d printed the final turned-blue image on two-ply bristol board that my printer only chokes on about 50% of the time, and then penciled on that.  I did the inking with various G-pen nibs, then scanned and colored in Photoshop:

inks_01

jabberwacky_final

At this point, though, the project moved from being solely mine to being one that involved…

wonderpets

Teamwork!  So, off it went to J. Chris Campbell for a little tweaking.  He “texturized” things a bit, using these images for the ground and sky areas of the cover:

earth

stars

Then, finally, J. Chris added this fantastic hand-drawn lettering from fellow WAPpie,  Dustin Harbin.  Here’s the final cover for the Wide Awake Press Free Comic Book Day issue, “Jabberwacky“:

jabberwacky-cover

The original art for this is for sale here.

Mar 08 2010

Amelia Press Roundup 3/8

amelia_jacket

When my last book, Midnight Sun, came out I made a point of posting links to all of the reviews it received.  I noticed eventually, though, that most of the more substantive reviews wound up getting links from ComicsReporter and/or Journalista, so I vowed that with whatever book I did next, I’d stop posting review links.  Curiously, though, with Amelia, a lot of the reviews so far don’t seem to be getting picked up by the comics news sites.  This is, I think, probably tied in somehow with Amelia being from a big, primarily prose publisher–rather than a dedicated comics and graphic novels house.  At some point I’m going to a post about the various differences between doing a book for a company like SLG vs. a big trade publisher.  There are certainly some interesting differences.  In the meantime, though, here’re a few appearances of Amelia-related stuff around the interwebs:

Feb 19 2010

Sketchbook 2/19

…And yet a few more Count of Monte Cristo sketches, this time of Haydee.  She’s a character who often gets cut, or at least diminished, in film/TV versions but I’d definitley find a way to keep her front and center if possible.  I’m not really happy with either of these designs, but you gotta start somewhere.

haydee

Feb 18 2010

Sketchbook 2/18

Yet more noodling on The Count of Monte Cristo–this time, The Count himself.  The main thing I’m going for here is to (unlike any film or TV version I’ve seen) really play up the Orientalist nature of the book, and The Count in particular. I don’t know that these two images do that entirely, but it’s a start…

sketchbook_021810

Feb 16 2010

Amelia Press Roundup 2/16

amelia_jacket

Amelia Earhart – This Broad Ocean has been “in the wild” for a bit now, and some reviews and write-ups are starting to appear.  First, another (!) starred review, this time from ALA’s Booklist.  Booklist online is a pay site, but here’s an excerpt from the review:

“This is a true sequential art narrative, requiring the reader to attend to the visual as well as the verbal components; but it is also a well-told story of an episode in Earhart’s life that has particular appeal to readers looking for insight on how celebrity is both made and misunderstood, and how it matures.”

Over at Comic Book Resources, there’s a fairly extensive interview with me, conducted by Alex Dueben:

“The book’s artist, Eisner-nominated Ben Towle, has the perfect background to interpret this material. He has written and illustrated two graphic novels, both published by Slave Labor Graphics, “Farewell, Georgia” and “Midnight Sun,” about an Italian airship expedition to the North Pole in 1928. We talked with the philosophy major and rock musician turned cartoonist about Amelia Earhart, his interest in historical fiction, collaborating with writer Sarah Stewart Taylor and layout artist and series editor Jason Lutes on the book, and take a look at the two projects he’s working on now. ( more… )

Also:

  • The Times Argus Online has a general writeup about the book itself as well as  the upcoming book launch in Vermont.
  • An early post on the book I missed by writer Paul Gravett
  • A review from comics blogger Ralph Mathieu
  • Another review by children’s/YA librarian Stacy Dillon
  • And a slightly ho-hum review from ComicsReporter’s Tom Spurgeon. (Hey, it happens to the best of us!)

Reminder: If you’re in or near White River Junction, VT this Friday, or Chapel Hill, NC this Sunday come by and see me!  Click on those dates on my calendar for times.