Gilkey Warlocks Page breakdowns

Last month Nick Kowalcyk, Mike Davis, & I got together in Flint, MI to celebrate Jesse Glenn's 50th birthday with him. The four of us were very close friends back in high school, and variations of us have appeared in many Plotmasters Project creations, Mouse Guard, and most unabashedly––in Gotham Academy.

This recent reunion made me think it would be a good time to revisit the story on my blog. Below are my 'Gilkey Warlocks' pages broken down into roughs, pencils, greyscale, & final color. 

Page 1 Roughs:
For the hallway I made a little paper model (though the checkered floor was digitally added in). With this story being for DC and having a proper editorial process (unlike my creator-owned Mouse Guard pages) I had to send roughs in for approval.

Page 1 Pencils:
Because I was worried about smudging up a rendered pencil panel when working on an adjacent one, I decided to draw them all separately, drawing a little bit of overlap to make sure there wasn't going to be a gap between panels.

Page 1 Greyscale:

The pencils were all assembled in Photoshop and then masked off to conform to their appropriate panel shape. I added in borders digitally.

Page 1 Final Colors:
Using different layer modes I was able to color over the top of my greyscale page to essentially tint the image like a colorized black and white photo.

Page 2 Roughs:

The Serpents and Spells RPG name had already been established in the pages of Gotham Academy––but not what the cover of a 1984 era players handbook would look like, so I got to do a fun cover treatment and then paste it in.  I also photographed a huge D20 rather than drawing an icosahedron from scratch.

Page 2 Pencils:

Getting pencils this dark was difficult––I suspect that the file I opened to show you this already had some heavy level adjustments done to darken those darkest darks. On some of the panels I added in little crop marks to know where the panel borders were as I was drawing it, but also to know where to crop it when making the greyscale composite.

Page 2 Greyscale:

All assembled with some added in digital black space in the areas around the last 5 panels.
The digital borders on this included another dashed line between a panel and the zoom-in, something I enjoyed on the first page and continued here.

Page 2 Final Colors:
Keen eyed viewers will notice that on page 1 Jonathan Crane's name was on the secret door, and here we find an abandoned room with chemistry equipment and an erlenmeyer flask with 'FEAR TOXIN' on the label––and there goes Davey (Mike Davis) blowing off all that dust on the table into the air... 

Page 3 Roughs:
These pencils got a healthy amount of digital help when it came time for me to visualize the animated shadows growing off the kids, and then forming into Serpents and Spells monsters. 

Page 3 Pencils:
After the success of drawing the last 5 panels on page 2 together, I opted for the middle section of 4 panels here to all be drawn together.

Page 3 Greyscale:
I'm not sure why, but I think I put reasoning into why each boy's shadow became which monster––and for the life of me I can only remember Glen (Jesse Glenn)'s being an owlbear-like thing because of an inside Joke about real-life Jesse once drawing the friendliest owlbear for my homemade board game Tower

Page 3 Final Color:
This story was written, drawn, and turned in a few months before the first season of Stranger Things aired––you know, that 1980's period piece about four pals playing an RPG when one of them mysteriously disappears after a session. 

So there you have it! I'm still proud of this story, because it got me to stretch narratively (humans, likenesses, panel count (9 panels on page 2!), and in a different medium (rendered pencil).

I did a blogpost about the process of drawing this story back when the issue came out in 2016. The story can still be found in Gotham Academy Vol. 3: Yearbook TPB or Comixology.

Someday soon I hop to have a moment and revisit these characters––to show what each of their Serpents and Spells characters looked like.