March 2016

Today’s Strong Will Sketch of the Day update!!!

Today’s Sketch of the day is a twofer! Two panels instead of just one… Cause I’m a giver.

Here are some more Strong Will inks for today’s Sketch of the Day!

For this week’s Sketches of the Day I will be posting random panels of inks from Strong Will…

…And today, the final cover! Done mostly in MangaStudio 5, with a bit of Photoshop thrown in, plus as always Illustrator for the unseen lettering.

And now that that is done, I am off to work on the layouts for another comic book project!

Today’s Sketch of the Day is some progress on yesterday’s book cover. Added the skeleton, and started coloring the background a bit. As you can see, I put a base layer of yellow down for the woman’s hair– Since this will basically be the same color theory as, well, the last piece I mentioned color theory in, yellow will later be the highlight color over some darker, more orange hair… Hopefully it’ll make sense when it’s done…

Today’s Sketch of the Day is the beginning of my next book cover assignment. For this one, the client has sent along a staged photo of what she wants for the illustration. Most of the actual “work” involved with cover design is to not only get into the head of the author and get their vision down on paper, but also make it a compelling cover that someone browsing on racks or scrolling through Amazon will stop and take a closer look.

In this case, the author has already done both for me, so I just get to have fun and draw it up!

Tomorrow, I will show you what she’s so afraid of…

There is always a lull after a big project or tight deadline, so of course after finishing that book cover and the layouts for a big 2 page spread on another project, with a full page illustration for Sarasota Magazine thrown in there too, I went to bed at 12 and woke up at 1:45 (to take Rambo out) and could not fall back asleep.

So, I replied to some emails, one of which was from the writer of a project that had been on hold for a little while called Strong Will. If you check out the portfolio page you can see the first 4 or so finished inked pages. While the job was on hold, I would still pick at the pages whenever I just felt like inking (I am inking this project over the immensely talented Wendell Cavalcanti), so I was very happy to hear from him that they are putting together a Kickstarter to finish up the book! Once that is up and running, I will be bombarding you with posts about it…

Here is one of the random middle/later panels that I had started and decided to finish up last night when I couldn’t sleep. Why is this not getting posted till almost 4PM you ask? Well, after Megan left for work this morning,  I crashed. Hard.

Finally! Here is the final finished color cover for today’s Sketch of the Day! I don’t know if I can post the title and author since the book is so far out from publication, so you’ll just have to imagine the amazing trade tress I came up with 😀

Illustration done mostly in MangaStudio 5, with some Photoshop CS6 work, and said unseen trade dress done in Illustrator CS6.

Today’s update/ Sketch of the Day is of the finished line work and the flat colors for the book cover I’ve been working on all week. This is how all computer coloring starts, and in this case it also sets up my color theory. Everything in the background is done in orange, yellow, and red/orange, while the foreground colors will all be built off of the complimentary color, blue.

This use of complimentary colors should contrast the foreground elements against the background elements and “pop” them off the page. Seems to be doing it so far, so hopefully I don’t goof it up too much when I continue to color!

The next step is to color the figures in the foreground, and my plan is to use the same color theory on their guns and bows and belts and all– Use lighter colors from the other side of the color wheel to contrast them against the darker base color I am using for their clothes.

Till Monday, to see if I can pull it off!