Production Blog 11 Holiday Edition

Hello Again. Well it's looking like these things are coming out on Mondays instead of the intended Fridays. But here we go. Well I've continued working on the pages that I wrote about last week and I've finished a couple but this week I wanna talk about the Christmas card.

Ever since 2004 I've made a "Christmas card" for my comic as a little something for the people kind enough to read it. And this year was my first card to feature the characters from my new comic The Super Cliche Hero Chick. 

More after the Jump...

It was rather emotional for me last year, as I was ending Neuropsychosis, I new that that was going to be my last card to feature the "NP gals". But it was tempered with the joy that I was going into a new adventure of making a card with the main characters of Hero Chick. So it was with excitement that I began this years design. 

For my "first year" card I wanted to have an image featuring the three main character's of Hero Chick and for it to be funny. So I came up with a design that had Alice, Drew and Erin shopping for a Christmas tree. To point out that Alice is super strong I have her holding the tree with one hand. In Erin's debut story, the joke of it is that Erin and Alice hit it off so well that Drew, Erin's  boyfriend and Alice's bro gets ignored. So Erin is saying something funny to Alice to which she whips around to reply knocking drew over with the tree.

Concept down I did a sketch. 

I then began sketching in the pencils. I ended up changing a couple of things i decided to leave the tree unbound because binding it made it look like a garden shrub. I also moved the tree to Alice's Left hand one, because she's a lefty, two so that the unbound tree didn't end up in her face. Due to the unbinding I also changed the direction that Drew was being knocked.

 

For the trainspotters: I penciled this picture in Graphite as it is piece of marker toned original art, thus I had to erase my lines. I penciled it with 2H lead in a clutch 2mm clutch pencil. The lead was Steadtler. It's on smooth surface 300 series Bristol.  

I then inked the pencils with markers since the ink in them is resistant to the Grey markers I was to tone the picture with. I don't usually like inking with markers but it was a necessity with the image.

 For the trainspotters: I used Copic multiliners for the inking as they are the most resistant pen to design markers in the whole world. Note I did no brushed black at this stage as it could make a mess later. 

A detail of  Alice to show... um detail.

 With the inking done I taped off the edges with painters tape and began to work with the grey markers. Traditionally my cards have been in colour but i decided this year to make it a greyscale. Partly because I recently got a set of grey markers and their my new toy that I'm using on everything! And two I was unaware of the status of my Copics and I had no money to replace or refill them (running out of a marker mid Illustration sucks beyond imagination). I also figured black and white would lend a nostalgic quality to my first Hero Chick card when I look back upon it.

I toned the Piece character by character trying to balance cool and warm greys as I went along, I also made sure that a warm grey on one character wasn't overlapping with a warm grey on another, and vice versa too keep things lively.

For the trainspotters: I used Prismacolor warm and cool grey premier markers 10%-70% (warm) and 10%-90% (cool) I primarily used the small tip. 

Now with the characters done I then toned the background. I used a lighter value range on the background getting lighter as I went back, in order to achieve atmospheric perspective.

Now with the picture done I scanned it into Adobe Photoshop (see top) since I was happy with my hand toning I didn't do any photo shop work other than brightness and contrast (wish I was that lucky more often.) And then I put it into Adobe Illustrator to do the lettering. Initially I planned to make the letters black and white, but that was too dull and flat, so instead I decided to make them a more festive Green and Red.

The finished product

So to all of you a most excellent Chistmahanuqunzacha. And I hope you enjoyed this look under the hood of my newest Christmas card.


 David