They say you don’t miss your water ’till your well runs dry, and in the case of my scanner I’d have to agree. The last two weeks during which I’ve been scanner-less have really made me realize how much I use a scanner–not just for scanning final inked pages, but for the little things… like posting stuff to my blog!
So, to test out my fancy new large format scanner (I bought a Microtek Scanmaker 9600XL. Scanning area: 12×17. Look on my Scanner, ye Mighty, and despair!) I thought I’d scan a few pages from one of the current projects I’m working on–and scan each page in one fell swoop for once!
These three (non-sequential) pages are from a graphic novel called Ameila Earhart: This Broad Ocean, forthcoming from Hyperion. It’s part of the same series as Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow, Houdini the Handcuff King and the recent John Porcellino Thoreau biography. Amelia is written by mystery novelist Sarah Stewart Taylor; with breakdowns by Jason Lutes of Berlin fame; and with me handling penciling, inking and color. Perhaps of interest to fans of cartooning process: I’ve posted Jason’s thumbnails for each of these pages as well.
2 comments
It’s great that you show the public how you work through each page. They look fantastic! I’m a newcomer to your blog and first came across your work in Midnight Sun. I was curious about the grey tone in the pages(of Midnight Sun); is it ink and brush?
Author
Nice to hear from you, Page, and thanks! As far as the grays go: with my first book, FAREWELL GEORGIA, I did all the grays old school style, doing each page’s grays with black ink on a sheet of vellum overlay, then scanning the overlay, turning it gray in Photoshop, then placing it under the inks.
For MIDNIGHT SUN, though, I did a lot of the grays with a Wacom tablet directly in Photoshop. For places where I wanted more organic effects–like gray brush “feathering” or a charcoal effect–I did those as before, on vellum and then scanned them in.
You can see that I’m thinking about, and planning, the grays as I pencil. For example, in panel two of the first page above, I’ve drawn in blue pencil where I eventually want the gray of the sky to connect between those two cloud-forms, and have noted to myself that I want that edge to have that “charcoal” effect. I’ve written there in blue “G LITHO” which is a reminder to myself to lay in a gray edge there drawn with a lithography crayon.