{"id":2004,"date":"2010-03-18T21:00:42","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T01:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=2004"},"modified":"2010-11-18T10:02:19","modified_gmt":"2010-11-18T14:02:19","slug":"craft-wide-awake-press-fcbd-2010-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=2004","title":{"rendered":"Craft: Wide Awake Press FCBD 2010 Cover"},"content":{"rendered":"

As they have for the last few years, the folks a Wide Awake Press<\/a> are putting out a free dowloadable comic for Free Comic Book Day<\/a> this year.\u00a0 For last year’s issue, Ancient<\/em>, I was–alas–only able to do a spot illustration.\u00a0 This year, though, I was offered the cover, and of course snapped it up.\u00a0 This year’s theme is things medieval and magical, and the title is “Jabberwacky.”\u00a0 After a bit of back and forth with editor J. Chris Campbell, we decided on a basic Jabberwocky<\/a> -derived image: a knight with a magical sword fending off some sort of giant beast.\u00a0 For anyone what’s interested, here’s how the process went start to finish:<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I think Chris had in mind that the knight would be running toward<\/em> the viewer with the monster behind.\u00a0 For whatever reason, I instinctively had him facing us with the viewer sort of “cast” as the monster.\u00a0 Here are my initial thumbnails:<\/p>\n

\"rough_01\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"rough_02\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"rough_03\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I used orange, red, and finally a regular lead pencil to work over the image and tighten it up:<\/p>\n

\"colored_p\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At this stage, though, the overall composition was bugging me.\u00a0 I realized that the source of the problem was that the elements of the scene were forming two nearly-symmetrical\u00a0 “layers” that were sort of stacked on top of one another in a visually uninteresting way.<\/p>\n

\"colored_p_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So, after scanning the image, I moved some things around in Photoshop to try to create a more interesting composition.\u00a0 Once that was completed, I once again turned the whole thing to light blue and then did my final pencil drawing over that.\u00a0 Here’s the pencil stage both with the compositional changes highlighted and without:<\/p>\n

\"pencils_01\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"pencils_01a\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From this point onward, it was a fairly straight-ahead process.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I did the inking with various G-pen nibs, then scanned and colored in Photoshop:<\/p>\n

\n

\"inks_01\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"jabberwacky_final\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At this point, though, the project moved from being solely mine to being one that involved…<\/p>\n

\"wonderpets\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Teamwork<\/strong>!\u00a0 So, off it went to J. Chris Campbell for a little tweaking.\u00a0 He “texturized” things a bit, using these images for the ground and sky areas of the cover:<\/p>\n

\"earth\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"stars\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then, finally, J. Chris added this fantastic hand-drawn lettering from fellow WAPpie<\/a>,\u00a0 Dustin Harbin<\/a>.\u00a0 Here’s the final cover for the Wide Awake Press Free Comic Book Day issue, “Jabberwacky<\/em>“:<\/p>\n

\n

\n

\"jabberwacky-cover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The original art for this is for sale here<\/a>.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 For last year’s issue, Ancient, I was–alas–only able to do a spot illustration.\u00a0 This year, though, I was offered the cover, and of course snapped it up.\u00a0 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,45],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p46veT-wk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2004"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2498,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004\/revisions\/2498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}