Page 8 and the End of the Scene

Still going fast and strong! I really love doing splash pages, covers and pinups. For some reason the seem to come easier to me and be more fun. Not to say that this one was totally easy. Never did quite get the right hand totally the way I wanted it to look.

I did something different here that I’ve played with a bit on earlier pages: I did not draw any lines, and all shading was done with the burn and dodge tools. I just laid done my shapes in the shades I wanted, then I worked from there. Perhaps I would’ve been better served drawing in the more traditional cartoon, line style I’m used to. It probably would’ve been easier, but I always like to try new things, and I think these results are quite striking, if not stunning.

I also had fun playing with my more expressionistic backgrounds, as has previously been my style and always something I like to work with. It’s good to be able to make realistic looking backgrounds (like this crappy office Black Snow works out of), but I think more expressionistic ones certainly have their place as well. It has never been my goal to recreate a totally realistic look. Even if I was talented enough to do it, that’s not the way I want to draw, and seems to lack a certain creativity.

You can’t truly see it because of the size, but the eyeballs are actually very realistic. I re-purposed them from an eyeball I created based on a tutorial a couple years back, and I wanted to see how they’d look in black and white, darkened and mixed with more cartoony drawing. I think they work well.

I went a bit off script here, as Black Snow was supposed to deliver this line then the script simply called for “opening credits!” after, which Alex had a couple different ideas of how I could interpret (showing characters like a TV show was one, listing our titles and showing different drawings of Detroit was another, I think there were more). In the interest of time, length and simplicity I decided to combine some of those ideas and make them into a more traditional splash page with production credits.

What next? Tighten up the next scene a bit and get drawing on it! A very different scene, to be sure. With a new character (well, two really), so I’ll need to do some sketch-booking first as well, as I don’t totally know how they’ll look yet.

But before that, a return to I’m Famous! Maybe I’ll draw that next one I referred to before, as it is really good. But I’ll also get to work on I’m Famous in Japan!, as Alex and I have already started the writing and Mark “Rawr” Eagan has been working on his character designs (some interesting new looks!). I have to build the page for it and I have a cover design in mind (plus I’ll be drawing some of the strip).

Very busy, and interesting times.