Process

I've been working on my first new sequentials since I took more then a year off to study. I'm quickly realizing that whatever my old process was, it doesn't really apply anymore. I've been doing my best to compartmentalize the steps, but I can't help but feel overwhelmed by all the different concerns - draftsmanship, storytelling, design etc.

It helps to look at the process of other artists. The Work in Process blog is a fantastic resource too study. I only wish you could pause between the different stages or manually cycle through them.

Modern Vintage

I'm a big fan of art that looks/sounds old, but isn't old!

I love the idea of digging into the past and finding some warmth and humour in outdated production techniques. It's something I'm trying to tap into with my new comics work.

Oh, the Horror - Title Design 2

I refined the rough title treatment. I tried my best to keep an eye on spacing and character weights and all that important typographic stuff, but sure enough some issues arose. I decided I'd do the drop shadow for "Oh, the" in photoshop as getting it dead on was a major pain. I liked the treatment for "Horror" but I felt the character weights were too inconsistent.

The end result:

Oh, the Horror - Title Design 1

For my EC Comics Homage I wanted to try my hand at some hand-lettered type. So I cracked out the graphing paper and found a bunch of reference for the title. Here are a few things I looked at. First up, title cards from Batman the Animated Series.

I also looked at some older horror movie titles.

And of course I had a good look at the EC titles themselves

Oh, the Horror - Pencils and Perspective

The big struggle with this image was figuring out the perspective. It's a 3-point perspective image and I used the shortcut described on James Gurney's blog to get my grid in place. This method keeps you from having to keep track of vanishing points that are way off your canvas.

*Note to anyone using this trick - If you are curious how to fill in the holes left in your grid (see this image), just temporarily extend your markings up or down off your canvas using a piece of scrap paper, mark off those missing lines and you're in business. Thanks to Mr. Gurney for clarifying that for me.