Retrowood Page-Start to Finish

(Here is a page of my thumbnails for Retrowood. Page 4 is at the bottom right.)

Recently I started working on another Retrowood story.  Well, that is a relative term, since I actually started working on this story a few years back and took it to a thumbnail stage. Now I'm in the process of doing the finished art.

Most of my career I have been working on comic books pages that will end up as traditional "pages in print". However, with this recent project it has become increasing clear, that the work should be prepared for digital publication. And  working digitally presents you with a lot of options.

I look at the work of folks like Anthony Diecidue, Marcos Mateu-Mestre and Dan Milligan and their painterly approach to the work, and I really have thoughts about emulating their styles. But I am also in love (and a slave) to the traditional process of black line drawing...which is how I was trained and a system with which I have much greater facility.

 (These frames were all "inked" using the cintiq)

So while I stuck basically with what I am familiar with, I am still trying to learn and incorporate new things into the process. But the bottom line is that the work will end up being seen on a screen, and not as printed material that you hold in your hands. So you adapt.

Once I've worked out the plots on the stories I then do a quick version of the book as thumbnails. I try to keep these as simple and as bold as possible. I think every artist struggles with the decision between spontaneity  and precision. There is always a life in the rough drawings that is missing in the finishes; but there is also a quality to the finish that isn't there at the beginning. You just have to try and reach a happy medium. My cronies are always suggesting that I work more in my looser storyboard style for my comics, and believe me I am always trying to achieve that end- but it is unbelievably easier said than done.

(The next three frames are my pencilled frames for the page)

Using whatever reference is needed, I work up a pencilled version of the thumbnails. When working with pencil, I try and keep a certain amount of tonality to the drawings. In the later stages when I am doing the inked version, a lot of the tone and rendering will be eliminated for a clean and simple look. I don't try to make my pencil drawings look line they were drawn in ink. Pencil is grey...ink is black.

I don't have a single approach to the inking process. Sometimes I outline everything first, and then add in blacks. In this case, I followed Noel Sickles and laid in all the black with a big brush first, and then added what pen lines were needed after that was finished. It's basically like working on a watercolor where you establish your big shapes and then refine in the latter stages.

 

(I wasn't happy with the face in the last frame so I redrew it.)

I literally tried things both ways on this job to see what worked the best for me. I want to become more adept at using the stylus and the cintiq, so I wound up using Photoshop to "line" a number of frames, and then added on the "brush" work. The two problems I have with this is that I while I have been using a cintiq for years, I have nowhere near the facility with that tool that I have with the traditional ones. The other problem is that I haven't worked through a process in photoshop to lay in the blacks first. So after doing a number of frames, I stuck with my traditional method.

(The basic ink done traditionally and scanned in)

Once I scanned in the inked pages, I pulled out my pencil pages again and used them while I added a layer of  pencil on top of the inks. The beauty of the digital process is that you can add this effect to soften the line and create a bit of shading. This was similar to the Craftint process I used at one time, but infinitely more subtle. I found I created a "charcaol" brush that gives me the rough texture I like for the pencil "line".

 (Here the layer of "pencil" has been added in Photoshop.)

The final step is adding on a layer of black and white tone to the work. My goal is to make these stories look as much like a 40's noir detective movie, and this technique really helps me achieve this. I find I usually lay in a flat (or gradated) tone over the entire frame, and then come back in with the airbrush tool and add in darker or lighter values as needed.

(Here the final tones have been added)

 I sometimes add a layer of opaques if I want to add in a bit of white highlights, smoke,etc. I also find that I am starting to select more of the background areas and knock them back to a dark grey, to create that bit of atmosphere. Again, I'm really looking at those folks I mentioned above to see what I can learn from them for some of these subtleties.

Another advantage of publishing online is that color is just as cheap as black and white. And while I don't want to do Retrowood as a color book, I have been toying around with converting the pages to a sepia tone. What do you think?

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