Production blog 18

Hello and welcome to my last Hero Chick Production blog. As you've probably guessed, I've finished up issue #3 and it's off to the printers. I'm sorry it's been a while since I wrote one of these but I was in a mad dash to get the book done on time for it to be ready at the Long Beach Comic Expo on May 11.  Also the pages I was producing where full of spoilers and we wouldn't want to see those now would we. Maybe I'll make a process book and put it up on my deviantart after the book is out. 

But there's one more thing to talk about when it comes to a comic and that's the cover. So for this final Production blog we're gonna talk about designing the cover....





I don't like doing covers. I don't know why and I find it very strange that I don't, but I just don't enjoy the process. I'm a decent Illustrator, and I have Illustrated a book cover or two. but for some reason when it comes to the comics I have a mental block. Maybe it's that I have to draw it after all of the work on the book itself, maybe it's that they have to be in colour. The colour is the hard part. I'm not very good at computer colouring, and if I do it by hand it has to be able to compete with computer coloured covers. For my first two covers I chose to do them as cell setups but this locked me into a simple image and it was a long process that i don't thin yielded adequate results.  So I decided this one has to be on the computer. So I decided to use a method I saw mentioned by either Adam Hughes or J Scott Campbell (they both use it and I cant remember which it was) Where you greyscale the original art and then do Photoshop "washes" over it. This appealed to me because one it had the hand rendered aspect (I'm not very good with lassoing and making lines curve right digitally, I'm getting better). And two I'm an oil painter, and it reminded me of the process of the dutch masters, thus it was something I could get my head around. I then digitally painted the background. Now my digital painting is ROUGH but I was planning to blur it so I proceeded with the plan.

now the process.

As with all things I started with thumbnail sketches. I wanted a cover that was like a panel with snarky dialogue (Hero Chick and her alter ego Alice are snark machines) I went with the third sketch with the dialogue "It's the third issue how bad could it be" with big and ugly behind her ready to give her a  pounding.

Next on tracing paper I made the rough sketch. As you know from reading my previous blogs I usually go straight onto the board with blue pencil. but as this is going to be toned original art I need a clean surface so I then light boxed this drawing onto the final board...

This is what it looks like after light boxing I then work on the pencil drawing trying to keep it loose...

It was at this point that one of my coworkers told me that her left hand placement looked a bit... inappropriate...

So I reworked her arms into a tighter shrug... and the pencil sketch was done. As you've probably noticed I don't like doing full pencils, this allows my inked art to be livelier. But in the case of this illustration I had to keep the board clean so that the markers don't get messy. I then inked the drawing with Copic multiliners as opposed to my normal brush pen, because Copic ink is the most impervious to markers. A step I sadly didn't Photograph. I then begin the toning.

And there we go "final" original art. Now I put it into the Photoshop machine. And begin the colour work....

First I "flat" in all the major colours. Each colour has it's own two layers a main layer that covers the whole object. Also a second layer "placed" under the main layer that is for a darker "wash" in the darkest areas only.

Then over an afternoon, listening to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, I proceeded to paint the background, in a series of layers. Trying my best to make it come out like a gauche painting...

I then returned to the main figures for some hand painted bits. Such as highlights. I then decided the building needed some more work so I did some more to it... then I added a blue and red "Glaze" over the whole background to unify it. I chose the blue one....

Then I blurred the background....

I then finalized my copy. As a dialogue between an unseen narrator and Hero Chick. To Read

                                                                      NARRATOR

                       In this Issue Hero Chick Fights Her Vicious foe yet.

                                                                      HERO CHICK

                       Relax!  It's only issue 3! it can't be that bad... Can it.

                                                                      NARRATOR

                      Oh it can...

I then submitted the dialogue to Ruben and he suggested I let it hang at "... Can it? So that's the dialogue that I went with. So I then proceeded to import the file into Illustrator, where I placed the mast head and with my newly acquired font* Lettered the cover.

giving us this...

I hope you enjoyed this months long look into my creative process. I found it very interesting and informative to write. I probably won't be doing another one of these however since after the first couple it was mostly repeating myself. But I will most likely be posting pics of issue 4 in a couple of weeks. Until then

Enjoy.
David.

* For those that are interested the font I used is blambot's Letteromatic font. Blambot is a great comics font foundry, and they aren't all full of themselves like Comiccraft.