September AotM: FADE!

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Dave

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Jack Stalnaker lived a good life. He traveled the quiet places of the world, searching for every view that evoked that skin tingling awe of inspiration, but enjoying every moment of the journey. He reveled in the coursing blood and hard breath of the fog-wet mountain hike, and the desert dust wafting in through open Jeep windows. He reveled in lone sodium lights through venetian blinds: styrofoam moons through steel-rail clouds. He ate up the depression of losing a girl like candy-coated barbiturate. He stood on the beaches after sunset, and tested his faith, running down dark sands believing for all the world he would fly, returning to his sleeping bag somewhat disappointed, but no with no less faith in his magic.

Then Jack died. He stood before the Judgement on top of clouds, and the deep blue sky echoed like a soundstage. He stood in line with all the Dead, and each was addressed in turn. "Would you like to go to Heaven or Hell?" Those to be damned knew it, and trembled head-down in dejected fear. When the Judge came before Jack, and asked his question, Jack replied, "Neither. I'm not done with the Earth. You made this beautiful thing that I am afraid I'll never see again with human eyes. I want to crawl all over it, I want to know every mountain, and every hole. Can I go back?" The Judge pondered for a moment, and said, "Very well. You shall return, and you will be its Custodian."

And so Jack went back, and found before him on the edge of a starry desert a shack with a light inside. An old man with hollow eyes answered his knock, smiled wanly and sighed, "She's all yours." He left a small brass key in the hands of Jack. In the shack, Jack took up a tired old push broom, and went to the edge of the desert, where the sand crept up over the grass, and swept. Grass and fragrant flowers leapt up in the wake of his broom, and Jack pushed back the desert a hair's breadth. From a shelf in the shack he pulled down a cardboard box marked "STARS" in careless magic marker, and he walked to the Great City. He opened the box, and within were firefly pinpricks of light floating. He stretched up and placed them before him in the sky, and brought night back to the Great City.

In the shack again, Jack sat on a straw tick mattress in the warm glow of a gas lamp, and found a sketchbook and pencil, and he began to draw...
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Most of my art is devoted to the production of Fade, a web comic book about a 20-something kid named Timothy Holt who has none of the typical motivations for being a hero. He had a normal home life, and he's studied and done well in school. That becomes his motivation--to break the cellophane ceiling. To become something less ordinary. To have something to fight for.
Originally, Holt was meant to become Fade in the opening book, and become something of an ordinary crime fighter. But when I started writing the origin, I thought, why shouldn't the origin story be MORE prominent? People love those. So I lavished detail on the origin. It's still not done yet.

Fade falls into the genre of "science-fantasy", the most prominent example of which is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle. It has a strong mix of real science and fantasy. Most of the science is based on string theory or other physics, and it ties into the definition of magic in the story (which we're just getting to).

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First, some non-Fade stuff

An old watercolor called "Creation".


"Paperwings" watercolor and ink.....and Wite-Out


"Red Shift" charcoal--I was trying to create an ambiguity over whether this is the front or back of this person. I was also going for "falling" or "motion".


PvP fanart





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Now some Fade. I'm posting pencils. You can see inked and/or colored and lettered pages at http://www.fadecomic.com



(One of my favorites, where the river takes the Dale house as Vruk looks on)










(In color--just showing the coloring technique I came up with after lots of experimentation)


(actually still working on this one. It's the latest page)
 

Cajungal

Staff member
Nice. You do some really interesting and beautiful stuff. That last one reminds me of a dream I had.
 
I remember that PvP fan art, due to its high awesome quotient. I also love "Paperwings." That is the kind of piece I would pay for.
 
Fade, your stuff is fantastic!

You've got perspective nailed down tight. Were did you learn to do this? Also, how do you have time to do this? I know you're married and a prof.

Hope to see Fade in print someday!
 

fade

Staff member
Thanks everybody. To answer your questions, I never took any formal classes. I did read books though. I used to do the whole vanishing point bit (and I still do with very square things), but usually I just fake perspective. Also, I don't really have time to do this. I can't start until the kids are in bed, and by then, I'm usually tired. So the end result is a very slow update schedule. At one point, I was updating very rapidly, and I had a decent audience, but that fell off unfortunately. I wish it was more cartoony like PvP or CAD, because that's at least easy to execute. I've actually toyed with the idea of moving to a more animation-like drawing style to save time.
 
Yeah, just realised I had'nt commented yet - love your stuff, and sad that it doesn't update more often. Get rid of the kids so you can update more often >:[
 
Thanks everybody. To answer your questions, I never took any formal classes. I did read books though. I used to do the whole vanishing point bit (and I still do with very square things), but usually I just fake perspective. Also, I don't really have time to do this. I can't start until the kids are in bed, and by then, I'm usually tired. So the end result is a very slow update schedule. At one point, I was updating very rapidly, and I had a decent audience, but that fell off unfortunately. I wish it was more cartoony like PvP or CAD, because that's at least easy to execute. I've actually toyed with the idea of moving to a more animation-like drawing style to save time.
That was my struggle to, took me way to long to write, draw, ink, and color everything.

Have you considered finding someone to help you? A co-artist?

By the way, your stuff really looks great man...
 

fade

Staff member
Thanks. Yeah, I've shopped around. I could really use a fill-in artist more than anything else. Nobody wants to do that though, since it's typically uncredited work. I have a really good editor (though I embarrassingly haven't credited her--thanks Beth Davidson). I could use a colorist, too. Part of the reason I use the coloring style I do is that it's easy and fast. The traditional cut-and-grad style coloring takes forever. Actually, flatting with solid colors takes forever, and it's boring as all hell.

If any of you wants to help, I will totally credit your work. Can't offer money as I make none on this myself, but it's good art practice. Heh.

See, this right here is a good example of my time problems. I've had business trips and classes stacked up after my turn as AotM started, so the comic has been static now of all time. It's usually not THIS slow.
 

fade

Staff member
New pencils hot off the...pencil. Hmm...shrunk down like this I can see that the eyes in panel 5 are not on line with one another. I'll have to fix that...

 

fade

Staff member
Just Photoshop (CS3). I typically have a layer setup like this:

  1. "Glints", Normal 100%
  2. "Darks", Darken ~23% (for bluing things into the background)
  3. "Shades", Multiply 30%, for shading
  4. "Colors", Overlay 100% (for that colored pencil look)
  5. "Pencils", Multiply 100% (scanned art)
  6. "Washes", Normal 40% for coloring large areas. A lot of shading and highlighting takes place here, too.

Give or take a billion other layers for things that don't fit in anywhere else. Like the filtering sun rays.
 
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