Environment Building

What do you do if you have a specific set of scenery that's going to show up frequently in your pages?

That's something I ran into this past weekend as I was prepping thumbnails for more pages of Border Crossings. Throughout the (eventual) 5-issue arc, the main characters travel on a Nautilus-like submarine called The Rhizome. Before I could start penciling any pages involving the interior of the Rhizome, I had to lay out a floorplan.

If you're faced with a scene you know you're going to visit frequently, or if it's a very specific place, you need to make sure you have the floorplan of the set planned accordingly. Otherwise, you'll run into the misfortune of drawing randomly placed things in the background, which throws off the disbelief of the artwork, and eventually you'll be called out for your laziness or ineptness (Not really, but considering how some readers are, you never know.)

This isn't a new idea by a long shot. Illustrator Frank Hampson used to construct scale exterior and interior models of the spaceships seen in his strip Dan Dare, ensuring that everything was properly in its place. It also provided him with a means to see how the ship would be affected by lighting schemes, so it provided a double-use.

Modern-day comic book artists like Paolo Rivera and Lenil Yu use similar techniques, using a program called Google Sketchup. It's all the frustration of making a scale model, without the cost of materials or storage! And it makes it incredibly easy to set up your shot, save it as a jpeg, then use it for reference or lightbox drawing, depending on your workflow.

TV and movies have been doing stuff like this for YEARS. Look at the floorplans for the Millennium Falcon, or the Serenity from Firefly. These were all designed so you wouldn't have reality inconsistencies. Looking at the blueprint above of the Serenity, how weird would it be if the characters left the cargo room and immediately showed up in the bridge?

I haven't reached this stage yet with the Rhizome, but here's what I have so far. The exterior needed to be tweaked a bit in its design from its days in the promo comic (which means when it comes time to ink that splash page, I'll need to ensure that I adjust the drawing,) but you can see what I have planned out for the interior. For me, this isn't enough. I still need to make more detailed floorplans of key areas (Engine room, Bridge, Holding Bay, etc), and I also need to design the interior aesthetics. But once all that hard work is out of the way, I'll have a very concrete set I can stage all my action on, which helps the believability of the story.

Digital Pencilling

So, I recently started up work on Border Crossings. This was originally a comic that was pitched to Red5, but they decided (after a few drawn out weeks,) to not carry it. I suspect it was partly because at the time we pitched it, Diamond dropped their new (and stupid) shipping policy, and they decided to not bring on another new title. It's unfortunate, but to make up for it me and the writer Christian have started it up as a webcomic. Currently, the site only has the promo, but as time progresses (and before Heroes Con) we'll have a full site up and running with new content. You can view the current url with the promo here.

I bring this up because I'm taking a different approach to these pages than I have to comic work in the past. To help speed up stuff, I'm digitally penciling the pages first, then printing them out to ink them traditionally. So far, I've been having a blast, even though the surface of the cintiq screen is a little slippery for my tastes. That's why I hadn't bothered doing it entirely digitally, simply because I don't have nearly the same amount of control.

So here's the digital pencils from panel 1 of the first page...

And here's the inked version!

So far, I can't complain.

Painting Madness

Whoo...bit of a while since my last post. It's not that I haven't been busy, just haven't had anything worthwhile to throw up.

So here's a WIP I have of a little painting I'm doing in Painter X. I've tried out Painter in the past, but never really took for it, and this time I decided to really sit down and do a piece from start to finish.


Here's a bit of the underpainting for you all to check out, sans the refining bits on top. I feel like this thing is nowhere near the end of it, but it's done at least for the day. Approaching something like this is difficult, for me at least, since for some reason I just can't wrap my head around color forms. When I see line, I feel confident in it, but the more that disappears, the more unsure I get... I guess what I really should be doing is finding my own style of painting. In the meantime, I'll keep flailing as I try to get a footing.

Random Fun

Best fun is always with abstract perspective boxes...'cause who knows where it'll lead.

Some more BC sketches

Hey all, So, come next week I'll be hitting the pages to start penciling Border Crossings. This week I've been spending drawing and tweaking designs and getting the feel for the world itself. I still have to do some environment studies as well as thumbnails for the pages, but no worries. Anyway, here's some stuff from that, of the local fare that inhabit the Last Island of the world. The weird gnarly fella that's been colored? He's a glass being of sorts, so I'll probably need to find myself some nice lighted references of glass sculptures by Chihuly or something.

Sketches

Hey all! Monday's are always a slow start, so here's some sketches from earlier today. They're some ideas for a comic book project I'm working on. Even though it's really unfeasible, I like the idea of a large beast of burden being a taxi cab of sorts.

Also, giant cephalopods shopping is a funny idea.

Expect some more stuff from this later in the week...

Alien Life, Part Trois

Hey! I'm back from NY Comic Con! It was a blast to be there, and I met a lot of great people. Hopefully it'll generate some work for me, but if not, then the experience alone was worth going for it.

Anyway, back to the grind. Here's an alien mockup I did to test out a process method of using a grayscale drawing and then colorizing it. I think it'd work great to quickly get something out of the way (at least for me, since I am lacking in the painting department) but it'd be terrible for doing a final piece.

I've been reading up on evolution theory and all that, and I find it fascinating how most life on land came from fish...It certainly brings up ideas of what could happen if another creature was the mother archetype for everything, and considering how varied our own history has been with species, the possibilities are endless...

Which is sad then that this is pretty tame considering what sort of genetic playground a creature artist could play in. But that just means I gotta up the ante for the next critter drawing.

More Alien Life

Here's another page before I head off to NY tomorrow. I like the idea of a myriad of species coming from one base that has a distinct trait. Towards the end of this page, I decided that trait would be rutting horns that form from condensed hair, kinda like a rhino's horn.

Aliens, Comics, and NY!

Hey hey! Rarely do I show a whole page of one of my sketchbooks, but here ya go, in all its twisted, savage glory. For some reason, I think my alien/creature drawings look more like life studies than my actual studies of real animals...guess my brain just operates in a whole different spectrum.



Also, this has been something that's been a long time coming, but here's five pages from a recent pitch I did. We're still in talks over getting someone to pick it up, but I thought a five page taste would let the world see what I was busy on for a while a couple of months ago.






And finally, I'm gonna be off to NY for the Comic Con up there this Thursday to Sunday! So if there's anyone out there that's gonna be heading out that way, lemme know! I'd love to hang out with some new art buddies and all that.

color mixin' noodlin'

You may recognize these sketches from the previous post, only they now have a splash of color! I was mainly fooling around with some brush variants and testing out the limited palette I made in photoshop just to see how well color mixing can work. I can definitely get lighter colors and a nice array of mixed colors, the only troublesome spot right now is trying to get dark, saturated colors.

New sketches!

Hope everyone had a good holiday these past couple of weeks, I sure did. Here's some sketches I did recently to test out some coloring techniques in PS. I'll be posting the colored versions sometime later. In other news, I just finished block modeling a human in maya! It's not detailed by any stretch of the word, but it's a good simple mesh for me to start from for Zbrush. Up next, my continued quest to figure out how to model armor on these blasted sculpts...

More Zbrush Hilarity

Man, with the way updates are going, it seems like all I do is sit on Zbrush...

Actually, I am gonna be uploading a sneak peek soon of what has kept me busy, but that probably won't happen till tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a fun glimpse at another go at Zbrush...

I decided to try and do a mock-up of Ahab. The face itself was pretty quick to rough in, since most of the stuff like his head, neck and such wouldn't be seen. I started to do a rough of the armor, then quit. I might pick this one back up to flesh out the armor again...

Then again, with how quickly it is to set up something in this, I might just start over and do an ever better representation. Anyone out there do armor before in Zbrush? I got a good base by masking the part I wanted in armor and extracting it to a new subtool, but I wonder how well it would work for segmented stuff...hmmm...

Zbrush Hilarity

I took another day to sit down and fool around in Zbrush more, and after watching one or two videos, I can now roughly block in a head in about 1-2 hours. Not too shabby on my second try! The head was done without reference, so there's probably oodles of problems just permeating on the surface, but for a quick glance, I think it works pretty well...



Of course, I didn't stop there, so I added some horns and weird decoration onto it, then used my beloved alpha channels to make him scaly...

Photoshop Palette

Here's a fun tip for you! I recently came across a new blog called Art and Influence (Link over to the right.) It's a wonderful blog run by two oil painters who are sharing their wealth of knowledge to the world. Anyway, I came across this Pic they have of a palette they recommend using, one that's devoid of secondary and tertiary colors:


This got me thinking, since I'm not a traditional painter (or even a painter to begin with, Hah!) Could this be replicated in Photoshop to achieve the same effects? So, I booted CS3, and pulled up my winsor newton swatches, and matched the colors best I could. Here's the result:


As you can see, I think it might work pretty well. The background for the palette is a neutral gray, and the brush I used was a simple round, no shape dynamics, opacity set to pen pressure, and the spacing on it set to 1% (The trick is to get a smooth even brush where you see no stamping. Anywhere between 1-10% will show this pretty well, just make sure you computer can handle it.) For the curious, here are the colors, and their respective color slider combos, in CMYK and RGB.

Titanium White: C: 0 M: 0 Y: 0 K: 0/ R:255 G:255 B:255

Cadmium Yellow (Pale or Lemon): C: 4 M: 0 Y: 89 K: 0/ R: 255 G: 243 B: 40

Cadmium Yellow (Medium): C: 0 M:31 Y: 88 K: 0/R: 253 G: 183 B: 57

Cadmium Red: C: 0 M: 94 Y: 98 K: 0/ R: 238 G: 49 B:36

Alzarin Crimson: C: 26 M: 97 Y: 91 K: 23 /R: 153 G: 35 B: 38

Winsor Blue: C: 100 M: 99 Y: 31 K: 21/ R: 41 G: 39 B: 98

Cobalt Blue: C: 95 M: 69 Y: 1 K:0 / R: 0 G: 91 B: 170

To actually mix these colors, you lay out one of the two colors you want, then start to lightly lay down the next color ontop of the previous one in the middle of the palette. When you start to see the color you're after, eyedrop it and cover that little mix you made with it, then take another primary color and work it some more, and so on and so forth. The trick is you mix the colors only with the colors you start with, not with any in the mix palette (though like with any rule, it's meant to be broken.) The reasoning is because you want to limit your choices to your starting colors, which should help unify your colors. For all the people that feel overwhelmed by photoshop's insanity of color, this should be a boon to have only 7 colors to work from.

Warm-up and Paint study

I know I said I'd show off my Nintendo DS treat, but I've been lazy in taking photos of it. So instead, here's a warm-up done today before I finish coloring the pitch today. I tried painting without any opacity change and only having flow on, and I gotta say, I kinda liked it. I'll be trying out this further, since I think this'll get me to start using colors smartly to define forms. This was done only with the hard round with flow and shape on, and opacity off.

But what do I know? I'd be curious to hear some other people's approaches to digitally painting.

Random Fun with Nonexistant Clay

Here's something I did last night. I decided to start learning 3D modeling about a week ago, and was able to get a hold of Maya and Zbrush3. Maya, while initially was daunting to me, actually got pretty easy to figure out quickly, which is always a nice thing with a program since it makes my brain start to work furiously to think what I can do with this newfound power.

I had actually tried Zbrush before, but it was Zbrush2 and the experience was...less than fun. Like grating your teeth along a chalkboard fun. I'll admit, it was mostly due to the fact that I wanted to keep approaching it as a super-special 3D modeler when in reality I guess it is designed for 2.5D work (I've yet to figure out what that actually means besides making me believe I'm messing with 3D when I'm really fooling around with 2D stuff gussied up to look like such.) So, I was a bit leary of the new Zbrush, since my memories of Zbrush2 were of abuse and torment.

Happily, that's changed! Zbrush3 is a huge improvement over its predecessor (at least to me,) and despite knowing nothing again, I was somehow able to dive in and start throwing clay (for lack of a better descriptive word) onto a ball and form a random creature. I'm going to start looking at some tutorial videos now to actually figure out the ins and outs of the program so I know what I can and can't do, but the potential it seems to have is pretty exciting...

Holiday Aftermath...

Hope everyone out there in Internet land had a good Thanksgiving, or if you're from out of the States, a good week regardless.

I thought I'd give a treat and show off some pages from the pitch I'm working on right now. I'll be starting the coloring process tomorrow, and if I keep my nose to it, it'll be done by the week's end and ready for pitching!

I also celebrated my birthday recently, I got a neat little toy for my Nintendo DS that I'll share in my next post.

Cooldown

Here's a little thing of sketches I did once I finished my work for the day. Always good to unwind and just let your mind wander.

Tuesday's Warmup

Here's Tuesday's warmup. Guess I'm on some kind of alien kick, huh?

These stretches are pretty good for me, I think. Hopefully it'll help me in my digital painting skills as time wears on, but time will be the only judge, eh?

A murder perhaps?!

Who knows?! This is a rejected cover from the comic pitch I just handed off to the writers. In truth, looking at this again, even though I like it, could you ever imagine it on a comic shelf? Maybe not. At least not until the trade. The other cover we went with I think fits it much nicer. Thanks to all the folk that helped me with my type dillemma!

Morning Warm up

Here's a warm-up I did this morning before I go to hit the art desk. Got to get to work on another comic pitch (for those that didn't know, and I can't remember mentioning it before, I was working on a pitch for a comic book that hopefully I'll hear some news about soon.) In the meantime, if you want an idea of what the next pitch contains, check out the zombie and the tree Troll thing in the previous post. Yeah, we use those kinds of critters in this one. Should be a blast!

Also, I sent out my portfolio to the big 3 animation companies this weekend. Here's hoping something comes outta that...

Some more Dumps!

Sketchdump! Watchout!

Unloading from ye olde sketchbook.

Muppet!

So here's the result of the drawing jam from this week. You can see I took ALL the time in the world on it *cough cough*. I think it looks odd enough to work as a muppet, and since it's in clothing that any Scaddite would recognize me in, it ought to work.

Thumbnails...

So here's some thumbnails I've doodled the past day of environments. They were just little sketches, at best 2 x 3 inches in width and height, but they were nice little things to overlook detail and focus on the big shapes and values. I might take one of these to a finished piece, more because I feel it might help my painting jitters I get with having something a lot more solid than what I normally do before I go jumping in.

Whoops...

And I just realized that was a WIP I posted. So here's what I actually came up with at the end. Seriously, for real.

Drawing Jam! Update

So here's what I've got at the end of the jam. Yeah, I know, it's not done, quit yer complainin'.

In all seriousness, it was one of those moments of "biting off more than you can chew and not finishing it, but learning a lot as a result." I'm actually fairly happy with the enclosure aspect of the painting, but the viewing area was giving me major trouble. Super huge trouble. And let's not even talk about starting on the dinosaurs.

Well, this week's jam ought to be not as bad though, since it's not as complicated. Here's to next week!