My work on Ameila has been pretty much on hold this week other than working my way through the Canadian public library system trying to track down some much-needed photo reference. (One hopes their much-touted government health care system is a bit less labyrinthine.) So, I’ve switched gears a bit and have been working on Oyster War–mainly writing, but also a bit of drawing.
One of the “props” I’ll need for the story is this boat. I’m not really concerned with trying to draw a 100% authentic, accurate period vessel, (I’ve had enough of that with Midnight Sun) but rather, I wanted to use an historic vessel as a starting point and see what I could come up with. I’m not even sure what the name of this boat is going to be within the story, but, thar’ she is:
One thing I really like seeing on other cartoonists’ blogs is their process, not just the final images they come up with, so I’ve slapped together some images from my sketchbook that show the “evolution” of this vessel. I started with a civil war tug and went from there. I wanted the final boat to be a bit more recognizably boat-like, so you can see it getting less and less blocky as things progress.
I usually work in colored pencil first, starting with light blue, then orange, then red, then soft (2B) pencil–and finally ink, if it goes that far. For the purposes of rough sketching, Photoshop’s hue/saturation control is pretty effective at lifting out all the non-black colors once the sketches are scanned. I’ll sometimes scan images, remove the colors, change the black to light blue, then print out and start all over again… or just slap some tracing paper on the original image and work on that.
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