More digital texture painting

I spent quite a bit of time practising texture painting. Here are the other two pics I was working on: a husky (for fur practice) and a cliff by the sea (for clouds, rock texture, and ocean).

The cliff was especially challenging. It looked finished to me, and then I came back to it a few weeks later and saw everything that was wrong with it.

At some point you have to call it 'finished' and move on. So, here's the husky (reference on the left) and the cliff by the sea (reference at the top, my work below).

Pencilling the new graphic novel!

I spent last year writing (short stories and a novel) so I've only recently returned to my next graphic novel, "Rumours of Wolves".

Here's the first page: layout sketch on the left, and pencils on the right.



This page was a horror to figure out, as it's an establishing shot and there was so much information I wanted to get in there. I used Maya to lay out the building, horses and people. 3D is more accurate, but my original rough felt more organic. I like to find a balance between "technically correct" and "looks nice", so when I do the inking, I'll freehand it over the 3D lines to get some wibble in there.

For the last graphic novel, I pencilled on paper and then scanned it, did corrections, then inked digitally. This time, I'm drawing it all digitally---all on Photoshop so far, but I want to move to Clip Studio Paint as it has some really nice comics-specific features.

My awesome friend Grace Crowley who does the webcomic Magellan gives me feedback on my pencilled pages, and she suggested adding horse poop on the ground for realism. (Okay, technically she didn't say that the horses had to be in the process of pooping, but I couldn't help myself.)

New graphic novel: layouts

I'm now working on my next book, a fantasy graphic novel called "Rumours of Wolves". This story follows on directly from "The Penance of Borund the Bear", showing the fate of Duchess Karria.

The story is complete, so now I'm teasing the detailed synopsis into a script with thumbnails, and then into rough layout pages where I figure out the action from panel to panel.

Apart from close ups, each panel means answering a bunch of questions. Is it an establishing shot? How much of the environment do I need to show? Does the story make sense from panel to panel? Am I introducing a new character here? Can we see his face at this camera angle? Who's talking, in what order, and how much? (Even the dialogue balloons need to be thought out, so that I can place the characters the right way in a scene and with enough space around them for their speech.)

I use very simple models and mannequins in Maya to figure out the perspective and composition of the trickier panels. This lets me play around with camera views, and highlights problems I might not have considered (for example, thick stone walls mean you will have deep windows!). The more problems I solve at this early stage, the better.

Here's an example scene: three riders on horses, and a fourth character standing nearby. I have poseable 3D mannequins, but at this early stage, I don't bother posing them yet.



(Oh, and transparency allows me to see inside the buildings, too!)

Illustrating "The Penance of Borund the Bear"

I've been working away steadily on "The Penance of Borund the Bear" and I'm on the final stages for the interior artwork. Half of the images are finished, and the other half are coloured but need lighting details added. In a week or two, I'll work on the cover, and then... Done!

And then I can get started on book three!

Here are two images I recently finished. Borund the Bear is working as a palace guard on night shift so that he can fiddle locks and search rooms without anyone catching him. Unfortunately, he is about the open the WRONG DOOR and then... Things will go wrong.

And below is Duchess Karria, posing as a messenger so that she can escape from...

Well now, that would be telling.

I'm pretty much on track to get this thing finished by April, and then it'll be off to the printers!

Working on a graphic novel!

Okay so, I'm not dead! I'm working (slowly) on my first fantasy graphic novel "One Step Ahead", about a bounty hunter on the trail of a shapeshifter. This is the bounty hunter's mule going a bit crazy and creating mayhem. I'm only about halfway through with the pencilling... so much work!

The Pique of Death

I've been busy! It was time for a new publication, so I repurposed a short story I published in an anthology in 2003, did some illustrations for it, and put it into its own pretty book.

Behold, "The Pique of Death"!
Cover:

Here is the double page spread in the middle (the main character, a retired mercenary woman called Graysil who took on a hobby of strangling people, chasing some constellations):

And a random illustration from the interior pages. This is a lion-head armrest, looking unimpressed.

I'll be selling these beautiful little books at the MCA Zine Fair this Sunday 25th May 2014, and at Sydney Supanova in mid-June. Also online on my Zeera shop page right here!

So, it was Rob Chang's 40th birthday recently. Who is Rob Chang? He's the incredible teacher of this course: Becoming a Better Artist at CG Workshops.
He has an incredible commitment to all his students, so it was our chance to say "thank you" with a birthday pic. The theme was "surprise".
Being an animal nut, of course I went with... animals.

More work done for my animal drawing course: lions! I'm going to be doing a lot of lions at some point. And tigers. I did two skulls here from different angles to get a better idea of the structure.

The lion head source is from Hotnstock of Deviant Art and the skulls are from the amazingly awesome Bone Clones, where I would spend too much money if I had too much money and too much space. I hate telling myself that I don't actually need a full-size resin horse skeleton. It's hard. Really hard.

Today, dogs!

The skull reference photo is from Will's Skull Page
The dog portrait is based on a photo by Jaded-Night on Deviant Art.

Next up in the animal drawing course using photo reference... Cows!

The skull photo is by Jeidoll:

http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/?q=jeidoll#/d4t2z5v

The cow is by Casey in Deviant Art's stock photos.

I'm doing another CG Workshops course called Mastering Animals. Learning to draw animals means studying their structure, so that means drawing heads and skulls from photo reference. I'm also enjoying the digital painting! And fur brushes. Fur brushes are nifty.

I wanted a horse head and skull in a similar orientation, so I found the horse above on this site: Horse drinks beer to cure colic. (Heheheh)

 The skull reference on the left is by CitronVertStock.