Superb Man

'lo all.


I thought I'd spend a day or two working on a full colour Superman piece and it only ended up eating a week out of my life. 


Anyways, here's a step-by-step process:

The original, hand-drawn lines...

I then took said lines and digitally traced over

them in Flash (that 'S' shield had to be completely

redone as the original version was a mess)...

Next up, I add the basic, flat colours. This can take a while,

as I want the colours to look just right...

In order to make the piece 'pop' a bit more, I decided to add

a nice and vibrant sky background; nothing too fancy, but it

does the trick. During this stage, I also add the shades and

delete many of the outlines. The few outlines that are left

have some colour added so they blend in more. As you can

see, I also changed the shade of red on Supe's costume in

order to make it contrast more against the blue...

This is how the image looks after I've exported it from Flash

to Photoshop. Most of what you see here will get cropped out

in the final stage...

Before I go on to do the final crop, I add a simple gradient overlay

on a separate layer on top of the image. I find this gives the image that

extra bit of 'oomph' and really gives the colours an extra bit of

vibrancy. I also do some minor alterations to the image levels...

Et voilà! The final piece, post crop.

Sleep Deprivation

I never got to post an update yesterday because I was busy not getting any sleep last night due to my pressing need to get some business cards made up for the New York Comic Con. So, I stayed up all through the night before finally hitting the pillow at 8am and getting an hour and a half of a power nap.

Granted, I already have a whole rake of business cards that I got printed for Fan Expo in Toronto last year but, to be honest, there were a lot of glaring errors on said cards (namely, I got the email address wrong and neglected to add my blog address. Much egg on face) and they simply didn't get across the professional sheen I want my cards to have. So, I overhauled my old design from this...


...to this (I haven't received the cards just yet so the original file will have to suffice):


As you can see, I went incredibly minimal with the design -- I just wanted to get the message across without any clutter and I think I succeeded pretty admirably. Also, a shout out to Ty for his helpful advice. Speaking of Ty, watch this space...he's currently colouring one of my sketches and it is amazing, it really is.

Also, since I'm getting these cards printed by MOO, they allow you to get multiple images printed on your cards as well, so I thought (thanks to an idea given to me by Dave) what better imagery to go with than some choice selections from my art for Rodney Tentakle?

I'm just hoping that these things arrive in time for the NYCC, I really can't wait to see how these look 'in the flesh,' so to speak, having different images on these makes them almost feel like trading cards.

In other news, I updated the design for one of the Rodney Tentakle baddies after getting some good pointers from Dave. I'm really happy with how this turned out as it has a far more distinctive look than its previous iteration. Here's the original design...


...and here's the rejigged version...

I even decided to crank out the markers and do a bit of colouring by hand, which was fun and refreshing.

Finally, I promised I'd do some form of hand sketches every day, so here's my attempts from yesterday (pretty lacklustre, to be honest, got to try harder!):


Oh, and I got sick of my hair, so I decided to give it its marching orders:

A-Ok, number 1!

Rogue Hands

I spent today sketching up various designs for some of the Rodney Tentakle Rogue's Gallery. I'll be doing a pinup piece that will feature quite a few of the dastardly fiends, so I wanted to get their designs clear in my head before I get started on that picture.




Oh, I also did some sketches of my hand. If there's one thing that stumps me in drawing, it's hands. I'm ok at drawing them, for the most part, but I definitely could be a hell of a lot better. So, for the next while, I'm going to try and do at least one hand sketch per day.

MMMM

In my various updates related to Rodney Tentakle, I haven't really touched upon the extensive rogue's gallery that Dave has put together for the story's universe. They are an interesting bunch to say the least! Encompassing everything from ancient gods, to sentient humvees right down to electric cat ladies.

One of my favourite of the bunch, though (their description, in particular, was of the things that turned me on to the comic when Dave pitched it to me) are the 'Mechamechamangamen,' hyper-cute automatons that hide a majorly mean streak beneath their sugar-coated exterior. Basically, like an M&M that has a hidden layer of explosions and death instead of chocolate.

With a name like the (deep breath) Mechamechamangamen, I couldn't help but give these little guys a heavily Japanese animated look. I took inspiration from classic Japanese creations such as Tezuka's famous Astro Boy, to the not dissimilar videogame character Megaman.


My design process is pretty clear on these two pages. I tend to begin with a page of doodles and messy sketches as I try to figure out what the character will look like. Sometimes it'll take quite a few pages to strike upon a design I like, other times (like in this case) I sort out a design pretty quickly.

Once that's done, I do a page with a more refined version of the character. I try to find out as I go along certain little details (such as, in this case, the underlying robotic-skeletal structure of the character). I might also do an animation-esque turnaround of the character, just to get a good idea in my head of how the character will look in 3D space.

And here. We. GO.

With only a few weeks until the New York Comic Con, I decided it was high time to shift my arse in gear and get some Rodney Tentakle pinups done. The pages I have done for the comic are all well and good, but there's something about some nice looking pinups/cover art that just sort of fleshes out the package, you know?

As you can see, my process is pretty sketchy - I keep things loose and just let myself go with the flow. Sometimes this works, other times no. In the first image, I had a pretty concrete idea in my head that I simply transferred to paper. The second page, on the other hand, is a lot looser, with me basically putting pen to paper and seeing what happens (you'll notice as well that I've messed around with a possible new design for the story's Yeti characters).



Oh, also, while I have your attention, a certain someone is colouring one of my drawings. I'm not going to tell you who's doing the work or which piece they're colouring just yet buuuuut...let's just say I've seen a work-in-progress and have been blown away! Watch this space!

Shock. HORROR.

What's this? A-An...update? Yeah, hello there. I've been letting my little corner of the web gather a bit of digital dust for far too long now so I thought what better way to update than to show you my latest bit of comic work? The following page was written, yet again, by the shifty looking Dave Hendrick. He gave me a choice of three scripts and I chose this one because it was silly, allowed me to draw cool looking future tech and it reminded me of the best of 2000AD's classic 'Future Shock' stories. So, yes, here you go. I do have a version with the text added and what-not but you're just going to have to wait a bit longer before you get to see that -- I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise now, would I?

ARGH

This page should have been a doddle, it should have been plain sailing but noooooo, my Mac decided it was going to crash the hell out of Photoshop when I least needed it, resulting in me turning the air a particularly cruel shade of blue. I bought this bloody machine so I wouldn't have to deal with shite like this. Ah well, I gain some satisfaction knowing that getting these pages completed on my other laptop would have been nigh-on impossible, not without taking major shortcuts anyways.

After all that, I decided today I'd show you the full page rather than the usual one panel preview. Eh, I'm feeling generous!

Page 3.

No boobs though.

The colours for page 3 of Rodney Tentakle are finito. I must say that I surprised myself with this one, I'm looking forward to seeing how the other pages turn out!

Birdbrained

A bit of a treat for you lot today!

I've just finished up the colours on page 2 of Rodney Tentakle and, instead of showing you a snippet of the page, I'm putting up the entire thing. I've yet to add text and crop it down to size but the finished article shouldn't be drastically different to what you see here.

First off, for comparison, here are the original inks:

And here are the (pretty much) final colours:

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the original inks have been edited down quite a bit. The art was a bit too busy in places so I decided to bite the bullet and edit the flack out (not fun) -- if anything, it's taught me to be far more economic with my linework in future.

Anyways, I feel like I'm about to pass out...so I think I'll do just that. G'night all!