Covering My Tracks

The Big Bang Issue One will soon have a new friend, who I've affectionately named The Big Bang Issue Two. To generate some interest for this publication, or remind people of its existence, as the case may be, I decided to document each stage of the creation of the cover. I've been reading a lot of those artists' processes lately over on my two favourite blogs Drawn! and Meathaus so I thought I'd give it a go and maybe trick you all into thinking I'm more pro than I really am. So:

1) Materials!
Paper: 160gsm A3 watercolour card.
Pencils: 0.5 Faber Castell mechanical pencil with blue lead refills.
Pens: 0.1, 0.4 and 0.8 Uni Pin fine liners, with a Copic double-ended brush/chizel pen for bigger blocks of black.
Technology: Mustek A3 scanner, Wacom Tablet, Photoshop CS3 and the blessed iMac.

2) Pencils
In keeping with the first cover, I decided to use no human subjects on this one, and to focus on a tranquil/eerie city scene with lots of tedious architechtural details. Notice also that I employed a poor man's one-point perspective, which is about the only good thing to come from my Design Technology GCSE.

As you can probably tell, this is going to be another wrap-around cover with the vanishing point being the spine of the book. In other words, the right half is the front cover, and the left half is the back cover!

3) Inks
Once I was happy I had reached an almost finished composition I started inking over all the lines. I noticed that the windows on the left-most building were totally NOT straight, so I just fixed it when inking instead of drawing the whole thing over in pencil again. I blacked in all the little x's I'd left for myself in the pencils, which is something I stole from Doug Braithwaite and which is basically pointless in my case. Where Doug Braithwaite would then give his amazing pencils to some incompitent Marvel Monkey to ruin, I'm only drawing for myself, so there's really no need to tell myself which areas are supposed to be black given that I made that decision all on my very own.


4) Scanning
I don't bother to rub out pencil lines any more. It took me a lot of time to ween myself off that Blue Peter/smART technique, but I'm finally there. I scan in inks as 1200dpi RGB .psd files and use Photoshop's Image > Adjustments > Threshold tool to make all the blacks absolute black and all the whites absolute white. I picked that one up from this awesome RePro Guide you can download for free from Jordan Crane's website.

5) Colours
Once I'm happy with the crispiness of my lines, and once I've gotten rid of any specks, mistakes and other incriminating evidence I make sure the image is set to the right paper measurements for print and reduce the resolution to 300dpi so my computer doesn't have a fit. Once it's time to add colour, I go to the Channels tab, make a copy of my Blue layer, Invert it, use the little marching ants tool to select all the black ink lines (which are now white), go back to my Layers tab, create a new Layer and Paint Bucket black (or in this case, a dark blue) into the selected area to make a copy of all the black lines seperated from the white background. Then I can fill the Background layer with white and create an intermediate layer between my white background and my free-standing ink lines where the colours can go. For adding grey to comic pages I usually just need one intermediate layer, but for this cover I had three: one for the sky, one for the clouds and another for the buildings. And here it be:



I'll have the comic printed and up for sale at my usual outlets by the end of this month, so be on the look-out! Thanks for sharing the tedious monotony of comics creation with me. I feel better already.

The Crumpet Time Ghostly Gramophone Doodle Book

...has landed. And here it be, in all its doodlesomeness:


The idea was conceived when I realised how boring white paper was, and how changing something as minimal as the colour or texture of your paper can inform your drawings and make them look much snazzier. The item, as always, can be purchased from my Etsy Shop for a mere $4.00 which works out at about £2.50 English. Go there for more pics and info!

Wings & Things

Well then,

Big Bang progress has begun to steam along again - I can now truthfully say I'm more than half way through the second issue (only by one page mind, but still!). I've also whipped together a new product for my Etsy Shop, to satisfy both ornithological and capitalist hemispheres of my brain. Here it be:


Why, it's a birthday card centred around a very tenuous pun, of course! I realise these kinds of jokes don't aid me in my epic battle against the decline into an embarrassing Dad-type, but it did give me an excuse to draw a bird in a top hat and a monocle.

In other news, a friend of mine called Phillip Buchan has just written a novel and started a Twitter account @FrancisSobriety among other things. If you want some proof that this guy isn't a total douche (and believe me, it can be difficult proof to find) - he's responsible for some really great, really profane comics that were spewed forth onto the world along with mine in one of our earliest ventures into self-publishing with Phil Marsden, entitled Black Out. Remember? No? How about What's Inside A Girl? or Everything Is Going To Be Alright? Well, then I can't help you. I guess he'll have to speak for himself, or his novel will. His novel, which I can testify to at least being one-quarter great (since that's all I've read of it so far).

Anyway, that's all that blood-sucker is getting from me. Go check things out!

You Can't Kill What's Already a Dead Einstein's Ghost

Just saw this over at Paul Hornschemier's blog. If you can tell me what's not good about it, I'll tell you how long a piece of string is*



*answer: as long as your stupid boring face.

Jack & Daniel's Comic Book Workshops Blog!

Hello all,

I often make reference to the workshops myself and writer Daniel Clifford facilitate at various libraries, schools and other institutions in the area, but haven't, until this point, been able to do that fancy text link thing that I just did up there ^ Did you miss it? Here it is again.

The reason I can do this now is because last night we launched our blog - finally! Hopefully, we'll be posting photos, drawings and any other interesting stuff that happens as the sessions go on. We'll also be keeping an up-to-date list of all our forthcoming workshops and information on how you (or your little whipper-snappers) can get involved.


Follow the text links, or this bigger, fancier image link, to see the thing for yourself!

Viva La Home Office

I received a very nice e-mail and this awesome picture the other day from a girl called Astrid, who bought my Viva La Robolution print from Etsy. I've never framed or hung one before so it was super cool to see it on the wall - and in an already cool-looking space at that!

Thanks, Astrid!

Bitty Bang

Hello,

I've been hard at work for the last day or two finally knuckling down on The Big Bang Issue Two after a big hiatus while I moved house and various other excuses. The second issue is going to feature some envelope-pushing on the format side of things, the nature of which I'll not get into just yet - but suffice to say that when myself and Alexi Conman realised that such a thing was doable, my excitement was enough to put the plain old comics drawing on the back-burner until I brought the thing into existence. A preview of artwork featured within can be seen below:

It dawned on me yesterday that it has been 6 months since the first issue and I'd better get my act together before everyone forgets about it! So any and all spare time I manage to wrangle over the coming weeks will be spent pouring over old scripts, thumbnails, doodles and ideas and hopefully I'll have a new issue for you very soon!