Previews/In progress art

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As I said in "Fade Comic" thread, the latest page (5-10) is the most complicated page I've ever drawn. In terms of actual pencil time, this one took the longest thus far:



(the panels that look unfinished or empty will be finished in photoshop. Mostly by cut and paste.)

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Finished pencils:

[Espy]

Wow... very nice man!

[Creature]

That's pretty badass.

[Dave]

I want to see more. I have to know why the sites are on the bottom.

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He's flat on his back.

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Also, since the meat of the story is finally coming on, I've worked up a bestiary. I'm a SC native, and as General Specific can tell you, SC has a TON of ghost stories. I don't know why...but we seem to have an inordinately unbalanced amount. So, Holt, knowing this, gives ghost legend names to the creatures he sees. The only monsters we've seen thus far (Vruk ran into some in issue 3, and here is another) he dubs the "Goshen" after the legend of the Hound of Goshen. I've revamped their image here to my original design. I made them too flamey in issue 3. Here, they're more non-distinct and sketchy. They have distinctive curled digits, which have to do with, well, what they do. There are others to come soon. One, called the Plat-Eyes, is suggested here with the tombstone. Also, soon, we'll see the Gray Men (after the Gray Man of Pawley's Island). There's also the Cherokee legend of Spearfingers, etc...

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That took a REALLY long time:

[Espy]

Do you color by hand or in photoshop?

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Photoshop. I really want to try Painter, but it's kind of pricey. I'd do it by hand, but I don't have an undo feature. Yet.

Also: I have to say, I'm kind of proud of panel 10 (the couple on the wet street). I lavished attention on that one. That's one of my favorite kind of situations--a rainy street at night.

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I'm playing around with two things right now. One: how to draw a multi-dimensional Holt. I've drawn out a bunch of ideas, including Lawnmower-man like faces made of rotating bands of different facial features, some sinister looking stuff, and a nice-looking sketchy kind of Holt that I kind of like the best, despite his not really expressing the multidimensional aspect. IN the end, I'll probably go with a derivative of Cubism, since that was one of the driving ideas behind cubism in the first place. Yes, kind of like this issue's cover.

Two, I'm searching for a unique art style still. Today, I played around with an impressionistic style using an intentionally dull pencil. Out of all the new styles I've tried, I liked this the best. I kind of let the characters flow as they would, rather than rigidly positioning them. The result looks a lot more alive, and less mannequin like. Here are some really quick (like 10 seconds each) sketches of some people:

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Eh, I've been in the combination of an art funk (as previously mentioned) and some desperately due real world stuff, like grant apps. But I finally had a breakthrough today. On the next page, we finally see Holt after he in essence "comes through the other side" of the strange place the map sent him. I had sketched and resketched, and finally settled on something I wasn't really thrilled with. But I just had some good inspiration. Here's a scan from my notes:

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Okay.

Phew.

Wow.

After a LONG LONG hiatus, I finished this page. I hate to whine, but I really was in a superb art funk. I felt jaded on the whole deal. My skills seemed to have plateaued. So I tried something new, like I said above. I'm trying for less polish and perfection. Not that what I did was by any means perfect, but it involved a lot of time waste to perfectionism. So anyway, here's the new intentionally courser, rougher art applied to the new page pencils. I find it a lot more alive. I know, the head angle on Nachtmann is really off, but I decided to leave it, since it wasn't the focus of the page anyway. The last panel is supposed to convey a multidimensionality or blurry lens effect. I showed it to my wife, and her response was "my eyes can't focus on him", which I consider a win. It was also supposed to represent a corrupted homage of the Vitruvian Man.

[Cajungal]

God, you have a really cool style.