Taste of Process

My moronic writer can attempt to chew me out for sharing this, a pretty BIG REVEAL page, but -whatever.  There is no text in my spooky cell phone snaps of my Surface Pro screen. I need to post every single day- and the fact that it's getting late, and I did nothing last night but play poker with my girlfriend (not an innuendo), he can go bite the wall, as my loving father is so fond of saying. What follows is a series of obvious progression photos of one of our pages, along with a freeze-dried explanation of what I was doing, specifically. This might appeal to you artist types, or look like magic to people who can't draw (computers and toasters and other nonsense like that are magic to me, so don't get all fretted that I am seriously pooh-pooing (lol) people that are art stupid.), and, at the very least, serves as filler for my daily commitment to post... even if I did only get ELEVEN DAMN VIEWS today.

*groan*

Look:

 You're going to see a change-up in the look of Dragon Fatty, who's kinda making his big appearance on this post. I met with Tim one day to loosen my methods, and I really was pushing the fun- exaggerating in a big way. This is, of course, painfully rough (see background top panel), to fairly final sketch (blue). By the way: I'm not the sort of artist who looks down on digital as some kind of fake art, even though other artists insist it's not worth their precious talent. Just because I can paste a photo and run a filter on it to make it look like something resembling art, I don't, and neither do zillions of other artists, who care about craft... so you're going to see a lot of digital, because most of the comic is done digitally. I just did rough sketches for the pages in blue pencil. WOW can I ever digress. So much for freeze-dried. 

 Here you see I've inked, and laid in a flat color. This serves me two purposes. First, the gray is a base value that I can build on. Secondly, it's its own layer, and serves as a mask-able thing. I can limit my shading to that area. I won't go into detail on masks, because I'm not doing a full-on how-to-do-art blog. This is just general method stuff. I have more of that coming in future posts, so don't be a jerk... check back often!

Using that gray base/mask, I made a couple more clean layers. 

This is just more of the same. Mid-range values, darks, and lights all masked and ready to spiff.

Now I've gone in and done some air-brushy stuff, as well as some semi-crisp strokes (dark pencil in Manga Studio). I even started to goop in the background.

Like I said, I'll not get too specific today, but basically here I've added a new layer for hatch-like strokes (something of a style I'm developing), then mess with their alphas to make them fade all pretty... You an see on Fatty's pauldron, that I did a soft air-brushy on a new top-most layer.

I've also used the ink layer to create yet another masked layer, which goes on top- and now I can give more light fun to an otherwise flat ink. I tweak here and there, but that's generally it. Here's the whole page for your pleasure or disgust. Text-free, like I said. That comes free with the comic, if/when it's finished and you buy it or someone gives it to you.