Oh, the Horror - 64 color palate

Back in May when I was coloring my mock EC cover, I decided I wanted to emulate the look of 1950's color as much as possible. I read up on the limited colors that were available at the time and googled to see if someone had made a photoshop palate of these (64) colors. On that day (Saturday, May 21st) I didn't find what I was looking for, so I decided it would be faster to make one myself. I took a half hour and used this chart as a guide. It worked out fine, but I found the colors a bit too vibrant and wanted to give it an older, yellowed look so I overlay-ed some yellow and was off to the races.

Well - a couple days later (Monday, May 23), I fired up twitter and did a double-take - everywhere I looked someone was retweeting Ed Piskor's post where he presents a 64 color photoshop palate, which he made the exact same way I had! It was very surreal.

His version was much tidier then mine and it's what I've been using since! Thanks for sharing Ed!

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.

Oh, the Horror - Thumbnail

This is a thumbnail for a fake EC Comics style cover. I used the storyteller app to randomly get an idea for a morality tale typical of EC. The theme "Beggars can't be choosers" captured my imagination and I started with these sketches.