Turtles in Time Cover #2 process

The second issue in the IDW Turtles in Time series will find the four brothers in feudal Japan. The cover required all four turtles again and I decided to have them on horseback to continue the theme of the turtles riding a mount since I'd already had them all on the back of a running triceratops for the first issue. Even though I knew the idea of them on horseback in samurai armor had already been done in the third live-action movie, I felt there was someplace new I could go with it. For today's blogpost, I'll break down my process for creating the final cover art.

Not knowing how to get all four turtles...on horseback...in armor, into a single composition, I started with just drawing each turtle as they would appear seated on horseback. I then drew horses I thought would match their position. I didn't draw them touching, because I knew this way I could adjust their final positions. In the image to the right you can also see the armor designs...I waited to draw them until I had a rough composite placement of all the turtles and horse (next step). The armor pieces were drawn on a lightbox over top of the resized and placed characters. 

After scanning all the sketches I was able to tint them (to help see which turtle was which...and to see where one horse stopped and the next started) and place together a composition. The background was designed to be very 2D to emulate a bit of Japanese woodblock printing and to not compete with the chaos that is 4 turtles in ornate armor on horseback. I did some research into the armor, but certainly made each suit my own. I tired to match some design qualities to each of the turtles. Leo's armor is the most elaborate and complete. He takes this very seriously. Raph's helmet and headpiece has sharp agressive angles and looks more worn. Don's armor pattern is organized. And Mike's is more flexible & comfortable looking. Each drawing was tinted for an easier who's-who for my editors.

The inks were done by printing out the digital composite of all my sketches and taping that printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore Bristol. On a lighbox I'm able to see through the bristol surface to the printout and use that as a guide for inking. This means I don't have to erase pencil on the final image (though I did make a few tightened corrections in pencil before inking the whole piece). I used Copic Multiliners (the 0.7 and 0.35 nibs and a brush tip for the trees). It was tricky to make sure I wasn't adding details to the armor that wouldn't show up when the final piece was reduced for printing. In the inked version, the trees come out much stronger than my vision of the final art, but I needed a solid inked shape to manipulate in color, so it unbalances the inked piece a bit.

I scanned the inked piece into Photoshop (I use an old version: 7.0 because it still works for me and has all the bells and whistles I need) and started isolating color areas. This is called flatting where you are only painting in areas with flat colors (rather than focusing on shading or lighting effects). These Other than the background, most of these colors are wrong, and were picked on purpose to be garish and wrong. I wanted to make sure I was making all the details on the armor and horse rigging pop. To help me isolate these areas, each color you see is also a different layer (for the most part, a few times different colors are on the same layer if they do not come close to touching) For the final color scheme, I tried to incorporate a touch of each turtle's bandanna color into their armor detail.

Here is the final cover again with all the proper colors rendered and shaded and with all the lighting effects:

Other TMNT in Time Cover Process Posts:

Issue 1

Issue 3

Issue 4

2014 Appearances:

FCBD: Harrison's Comics: May 3

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Special Edition NYC: June 14-15

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Turtles in Time Cover #1 process

I have been asked back by IDW to do the covers for the new TMNT mini series Turtles in Time! I've done 8 TMNT covers for IDW already and getting this assignment for 4 more is a real treat. The Ninja Turtles were some of my first comics, and what started my mind toward writing and drawing my own stories.
To the left is the finished cover for issue #1, where the turtles are in pre-history.
For today's post, I'll break down my process for creating the cover.


Sketches: I was given an era for each cover (though issue #3 has been changed a few times) and for the first, it was prehistoric times. With my earlier covers for IDW, each issue focused on a single character, this time, each cover would feature all 4. And what better way to get all four characters into a good prehistoric image than to have the guys riding a dinosaur! I went with a triceratops as a homage to the Triceratons of the turtle's futures. I tried to get something about each turtles personality in each of their poses and reaction to being in the age of dinosaurs.

I assembled my rough sketches in photoshop in a cover-template. This allowed me to resize and reposition everyone so the overall layout worked without having to draw it all in one-shot. As I mentioned before, each turtle's personality is shown in their pose: Mike: I see as the fun guy who lightens the mood and rolls with the situation because he has to...and in this he's grabbing on and going for the ride. Raph is aggressively charging forward, weapons ready, about to take the triceratops by the horns if need be. Leo is the only one facing the actual danger (the meteors that ultimately may have caused dino-extinction) and is keeping the family together by gripping Don, who is such a logical and concrete thinker, is loosing his mind over the unrealness of where they are.

I printed out the above digital composite and taped it to the back of a sheet of 11" x 17" Strathmore 300 series bristol. I placed the bristol and taped layout on my lightbox and used the printed image as a guide to ink the piece on the bristol surface. To ink, I use Copic Multiliners, the 0.7 and 0.35 nibs for this one, and a brush with a bottle of ink for the fills. I was on the fence about the black silhouette ferns in the foreground and thought I'd gone too far with that look when I finished the piece, but my wife Julia said she liked it and to try coloring it as-is and only make changes if the colors weren't working (smart lady!).

So I went ahead and scanned my inked piece into photoshop (I use an old version for photoshop 7.0...pre-CS) This stage is all about filling in the various ares with their colors...establishing what areas are turtle skin, what areas are dino skin, etc. Because this is not a stage where I'm worried about the shading, I'm only making spaces of flat color, this step is called the flatting stage. I saved this image after I had tweaked the palette closer to what I thought I'd use, but my initial version of the flat colors had the turtles with a brighter green, the dinosaur grey and the sky blue-green. What colors I started with is unimportant when flatting. Once the color areas are all established, it's easy to quickly change the colors of any piece of the image.

The last step was the final rendering and adding special effect color-holds. Here is another look at the final cover:

Other TMNT in Time Cover Process Posts:

Issue 2

Issue 3

Issue 4

2014 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

TMNT Fugitoid Cover Process

This is my last TMNT cover for a while (though there is a chance I'll do some more of them for IDW down the road). The scheduling was such that this cover was not shown in previews because I couldn't get the artwork done in time for the solicitation deadline, but I was able to schedule it in before the publication deadline. And for a long time, I was told the subject of this micro-series 1 shot was to be kept under wraps (I think everyone assumed it would be Shredder...and this was a surprise) but the cat is out of the bag now, and I can share the process of this cover.

False Starts: My original sketch for this cover (which I started early) was straight forward...the old Eastman & Laird Fugitoid design in an alien city looking frightened (he is a fugitive droid after all). But I then got word from my editor that there was a new design for the character. He sent over the new design in the form of one of the alternate covers for the issue. I did a new drawing of this Fugitoid and digitally composited him into my old layout. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the layout work...

Everything IDW (comic publisher) approves has to also then go through Nickelodeon (TMNT rights owners). Nick thought the cover was a mis-direct to the audience. In this issue, Fugitoid isn't hiding out on the alien planet, he comes to earth to lay low. So, they wanted a redrawn cover with a Manhattan background. Knowing I was short on time for a redrawn cover, IDW editor Bobby Curnow suggested a salvage job on the layout with Fugitoid stepping through a portal and into New York. I loved the idea and reworked the layout trying to keep as much of my alien planet background as I could while showing a street that clearly was New York (with the Manhattan Bridge in the background).

Once Nick approved the layout, with a few small change requests, I printed out my layout, and used a lightbox so I could ink the cover on bristol using the printed layout as a guide underneath. One of the changes Nick asked for was to add either a Stone Soldier or Utrom as one of the background aliens. You will notice I altered the tank-tred-car's pilot in the lower right to be a Utrom. To get the portal effect, I inked the portal's edge on a separate sheet of paper. I used a brush (wet & dry) and a pen to get some fine lines and stipples. Doing the effect artwork on an overlay sheet makes it easier to isolate it in the coloring process.

Final colors: It took a while to get the right balance of light/dark, foreground & background push pull, and Fugitoid's leg to look like it was still coming through the portal, but with a good audio book and a night to yourself, you get there in the end. The color choices centered around Fugitoid being in the yellow/orange family, so I wanted to make the background violets & blues as a complimentary contrast to keep him as a focal point amid two complicated backgrounds and a cross-dimensional rift. I have two version of the portal effect layer going here. Both have been inverted so the inkwork is displaying white, but one is blurred out so the effect glows and isn't too crisp and clean looking.

I put in a lot of personal details on this cover. As a big fan of the Eastman & Laird run, I referenced their issues with Fugitoid. I looked to the shapes they made for the skyline of the alien planet, I added a few aliens from their panels (top left & right). The tank-tred-car started as something of theirs, but I thought it needed a pilot, which then became my place to sneak in a Utrom. Even the ground of the alien planet is based on the texture pattern of the alien-wood fence that Fugitoid & the TMNTs find themselves up against when they meet (I always liked how simply that pattern did the job of making the material understandable & foreign at the same time). As a personal touch, I hid a redesigned version of a race (drawn here by me) created by my friend Mike Davis back when we were in high school.

Watercolor Wednesday:

Here are last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces and better look at the pieces in case you missed them. First up was this version of Frankenstein's Monster. I've drawn the Monster several times and I keep coming back to pretty much this design of him: bald, neck bolts, stapled brain cavity access scars, face sewn in places (perhaps from multiple donation subjects) This time I played up some dark bruising under the eyes like one would tend to have after having surgery on the head or face.
The second is a rooster...because I felt like painting a roster with bright colors. And third is an older piece (from 2004-ish) of The Thing. This was the style of watercolor I was doing where I'd outline the color splotches after I painted a loose painting. You can see more of that type of work of mine here.

Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the new art is available.


2012 Appearances:
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

TMNT April Cover Process

My 7th TMNT Micro Series cover is the April cover. This cover was tough for me in a few ways. First off, I'm not all that well versed in drawing humans well, and even worse if they are supposed to be pretty ladies. Secondly, April is a character that has been represented a different way with every TMNT reboot/relaunch/media. And even though I have my own favorite idea of who April is, I was having a hard time coming up with a layout interesting enough to be a cover for her issue. I talked to my editor Bobby and we agreed that the old VW bus was an iconic thing from the old comic and the new IDW comic that would serve as a nice prop for April to interact with.

My first attempt at a cover layout was deemed a bit too boring, and looking back at this, I completely agree. However when I got the email from IDW asking me to rework the layout, I was crushed, because getting me to draw a woman once is hard enough, getting me to do it a 2nd time with the same or better results is rare. Other notes that came in from Nickelodeon were to give April less of a passive pose and more sass, hide/eliminate the VW logo, and give the turtles a bit more visibility through the glass for the reader.

IDW suggested April twirling the keys on her finger, an idea I liked. But as I said, since I'm not great at lady-drawin', I had to work hard to get the drawing where I wanted it. This is was drawn in my sketchbook. I started drawing her on one side of the paper, but worried I had flaws in the proportions, so I flipped it over and looked at it on a lightbox so I could see the errors and fix them on the clean side of the paper. It means that this drawing is the mirror of what my original drawing started out as, but I found I liked her facing this orientation instead.

I worked up a drawing of the VW, the turtles, and composited them together with my April drawing. At this stage I fixed a few parts on April's legs and moved her right arm up to where it needs to be so the shoulder is in its socket. To make sure IDW and Nickelodeon knew what my overall color and value sense was for the piece I added a lot of color under-painting to the drawing. Yes, I did that on the first layout I submitted, but that was more to cover the shortcomings of the drawing, this time it was to insure everyone was on the same page so there was less chance of being asked to make unnecessary revisions.

Like my normal working process, once the layout was approved, I printed it out at full scale and placed it on a lightbox with my Strathmore 300 series bristol taped on top of it. I inked in all the piece with Copic MultiLiners (the 0.7 mostly, but also the 0.3 and a brush tip). I feel that I lost something here with the translation of April's face. It's always a trick to turn a softly rendered pencil drawing into hard inked lines, and since ladies aren't my regular days work, I don't have practice minimizing the softness-loss. It was after I noticed the difference in my pencils to my inks that I stopped myself from over-fiddling with her face any more, and did the cross-hatch pattern on the lower part of the bus to keep myself busy.

The last step was the color stage. I skipped over the flats this time, because they aren't exciting to see (and I've shown plenty of examples in the past). I used the eyedropper tool to pick out colors very close to my color layout sketch so that there would be no surprises as I went along. I tried to soften April's face with a more painterly approach to her color-rendering, but I was worried about over-doing it, because Nickelodeon had asked me 'not to make her nose so red' after approving the sketch. The turtles behind glass were achieved with a few layers in front of their base colors that lighten and mute their tones.

Watercolor Wednesday:
Last week was the first of my Watercolor Wednesday sales. This is a better look at the piece I offered up last week in case you missed it: A Gotham by Gaslight inspired Batman. Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the art is available.




2012 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

TMNT Casey Jones Cover Process:

Cover number 6 of 8 TMNT micro-series covers I'm doing for IDW is Casey Jones.
Not as familiar with both Casey in the new IDW series and with drawing humans in general, I talked over the cover with my editor Bobby Curnow. We established that Casey running through someplace in Central Park with vigilante sports equipment in-tow would be just the ticket. I referenced a few photos of hurdlers to get the pose, but found that professional hurdlers have too good of form to be convincing as teenager/vigilante Casey Jones...so I found a photo of a kindergarten field day where a 5 year old was leaping over a hurdle and it was the perfect form for Casey. I sketch out the figure on one page of my sketchbook and some benches on another.

In photoshop I compositied the drawing of Casey with the drawing of some park benches. At this stage I also did some quick lay-ins for how the tone of the piece was going to be and to fill in the background a bit. I told Bobby when I sent this in for approval that I'd be doing some digital painting for the background. I did get some notes on the rough cover, but they had to do with changing Casey's legs and replacing the cricket bat with a hockey stick. I took the opportunity to enlarge Casey a bit and rotate him to make the pose & layout more dynamic.

The inks for this piece went rather smoothly. I used a printed version of the above layout on the lightbox to ink this on bristol board. Normally for folds in fabric, I'm drawing mice in cloaks and use stippling, but here I just concentrated on some well placed contour lines. The most difficult part of the inking process was the tread of that oncoming shoe. I wanted it to read as true to being a converse all-star, but also to not be so detailed that you couldn't believe it is in motion. Something about how painless this piece was to ink should have given me warning...but it didn't.

The next step was to flat the colors and start that digital painting...oh...there is the problem...I don't really digitally paint much...I relly on hard ink outlines to guide my color work...uh-oh. After several attempts to get the painted background to look right in the same image as my hard linework, I opted to add more falling leaves as a background cover-up and distraction. Here you can see the background still in process, but with newly added drawn & inked leaves I patched in. I drew that batch of leaves on a separate sheet of paper...still wasn't doing the trick though.



I rationalized that when I do subtle color backgrounds in Mouse Guard, I often will have inked crosshatched lines that I just color-hold. This adds a unifying texture to the page and is certainly in my comfort zone. So I went back over all my painted background using a wacom tablet to paint in crosshatched lines. I built them up on top of each other more like 'painting' with colored pencil rather than paint. This technique did prove to be the solution that got me through the cover. Here you can see a close-up of the hatching


I'm showing the process out of order a bit. Here is the final rendered cover, with crosshatched background, but by the time I was doing the hatching, I had already rendered the figure of Casey, the benches, and that golf bag. This cover took a lot out of me. I don't know if I conveyed the self-doubt I had while working on this piece in my blog-write-up...but it was crushing. I spent more time on fixing that background than it usually takes me to do a cover from start to finish. But I'm happy enough with it to have turned it in, and IDW and Nickelodeon were both happy enough to approve it!


I've listed the original inked cover art, sketch, & overlay inks for sale on ebay. Provided the auction goes well, I'll list the Splinter cover next...
CASEY JONES COVER ART EBAY LINK

2012 Appearances:
Heroes: June 22-24
San Diego Comic Con: July 11-15
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28

TMNT Splinter Cover Process

As I hinted in my Leonardo cover process post, I got a chance to do more covers for IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Micro series. This time up, it's their mutated rat sensei Splinter. My goal was to show Splinter as a bit of a guru, a master in a zen calm in his dojo...except insstead of a nice dojo, it's a sewer chamber filled with found and trashed items, and instead of a martial arts master, it's a mutated rat in a robe.

This is a composite of a few drawings in my sketchbook that I assembled to be the rough I turned in to IDW and Nickelodeon. They had a few corrections they wanted me to address. The feet didn't read well and looked like bandage wrapped stumps and they wanted the head to be facing the viewer a bit more and more craggy and brooding: "less Stuart Little". At the time, I wasn't pleased about having to redraw the head. I really liked this drawing...but after looking at it a few more times and starting a new head sketch, I could see how this head wasn't engaging enough

Taking the notes from IDW and Nick, I swapped out the head for one that had more age and wisdom to it and face forward a bit more. I edited out the feet, deciding to let Splinter's robe conceal his folded legs. I also lowered the stool he is sitting on to try and tighten up the space the candle glow would have to fill-in the gaps for. The background remained unchanged at this stage, but I knew that I wanted to make edits and changes to it as I moved forward.

I printed out the rough with the adjustments at full size and layed a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol overtop of it on a lighbox. I can see my rough through the bristol as though the bristol was thick tracing paper. At this stage, I filled in some of the gaps of detail on the shelves including an old copy of a TMNT graphic novel, a boy scout handbook, the Black Axe, and an IDW turtles book. There is a broken Mouser head, and the broken ooze canister hanging out on the shelves too. To get the beaded curtain inked, I daubed dots of rubber cement on the blank bristol to form the beads. I inked over them and when the ink was dry, pulled up the rubber cement leaving perfect trails of dots. I used a brush and some white-out to form the strings that hold the beads together.

The next step was to scan the inks and add flattened colors. As I've said before in past process posts, the goal here is to establish the areas that need to be different colors. I'm not worried at this stage (or at least I have to keep telling myself not to worry at this stage...)about the overall lighting and color choices, while I came pretty close to most of the base colors at this point, all I really need to do is organize the photoshop file so that the different areas are separate and easy to isolate for rendering and final color adjustment. One color choice note here though, I opted for the 4 patches on Splinter's robe to match the colors of the bandannas the turtles had in the cartoons & movies (and were recently bestowed with in the IDW series).


To the right is an animated gif you can watch by clicking on it showing the various layers being built up in the flatting process. Step 2 has the layer that ultimately is the the furthest back, but from that point forward, I'm working from the top down (each successive layer is behind the previous one).

The last step is the final rendering. I've added special layers to color hold the linework, to add glows and smoke wisps, and to shade the background evenly as it goes to the top of the image. It was a real trick to get the candles to have the right amount of glow to get the background to desaturate and darken to the right amount (without losing the details I'd carefully added.





2012 Appearances:
C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22
FCBD: Jetpack Comics: May 5th
Heroes: June 22-24
San Diego Comic Con: July 11-15
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28

TMNT Leonardo Cover Process

This is the last of my 4 Turtle covers for IDW (though I may do some more TMNT covers & work for them in the future). I had a melancholy feeling as I was working on this one. Bittersweet to be getting the chance to draw the Turtles (something I only dreamed of doing as far back as age 11) while at the same time finishing the job (at that point I didn't know if I was going to get the opportunity to do any more). To show Leo's commitment to his "work" I thought it would be good to show him in a rotten alley full of garbage. Someplace that would be uncomfortable for him, not only because he is above ground where he could be seen, but someplace even filthier than his sewer home.

The piece started with two sketches in my sketchbook that I compiled in photoshop. One was of Leo, the other the alley. I found a photo online to use as reference for the details of buildings and fire escapes and ladders and clothes lines and sketched it out with omissions and the addition of trash (though you can see I added quite a bit more in the final art). The section missing out of Leo's leg and his one sword were altered in photoshop. The sketch was a bit off (his one leg was too short and his sword was at the wrong angle and making an unfortunate tangent line with his head). The sewer cover I lightboxed from a photo of a NYC manhole cover I distorted in photoshop to match the angle and perspective of the alley.

The folks at Nickelodeon, who have approval over the comic line, were worried about the background seeming boring (they were also the ones to point out the tangent between the sword and Leo's head). To hedge my bets with them I added a great deal more trash to the alley. I filled up both sides and made some of the items recognizable (like a small mattress or couch cushion, florescent light bulbs, garbage bags, a pallet, & fruit crates) while making the rest of the bulk just shapes that are obviously junk. This was all done in the inking stage.

I also thought the scene would have more intensity (and make Leo more miserable) if it was raining. I placed my finished inked linework on my lighbox with a sheet of drawing paper over top. On the drawing paper I inked in rain falling, splashing, and running down the various objects in the alley. The inked rain is later scanned and adjusted to become semi-transparent light colored rain in the color file. This is the same method I use when creating rain and snow in Mouse Guard.

With the inked work scanned, I started flatting in the shapes. Flatting is the part of coloring where you distinguish color areas from one another: the green of his skin stops at the edges of his body, the red bandanna is different from his eye color, etc.. I have said in the past that the color choices are not even important, and here I used the wrong colors as I was flatting the garbage on purpose. Using these garish colors it's easier for me to see as I'm going that I have all those bits differentiated from one another and that I didn't miss any or that I didn't color outside the lines.




The final color art is ready when I have done all the textures and shading and highlights. I've color corrected all the color choices, and dropped in the rain overlay.

Upcoming Appearances:
London Super Con: Feb 25-26
Forbidden Planet London signing: March 1

Emerald City: March 30-April 1

C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22
FCBD: Jetpack Comics: May 5th
Heroes: June 22-24
San Diego Comic Con: July 11-15

TMNT Donatello Cover Process

I'm thrilled to be working on a childhood dream thanks to IDW Publishing. The Turtles are what got me excited about comics when I was 10 or 11. It also was my first foray into pen-and-paper role playing. For the IDW line of TMNT 1 issue micro series, I have been doing the covers, one cover per turtle. Here are my past posts about the process for Raphael & Michelangelo, but this post is about Donatello. Covers are storytelling and like the Raph & Mike covers conveying something about the personality of each Turtle, I wanted this cover to talk about the personality I saw Don having.


I decided to place Don in the sewer. It's where the Turtles call home, but I also felt that I could convey a bit of a loney-loner vibe that I see Don having. While I avoid the idea that the cartoons pushed of him being a computer programming rocket scientist, I think of Don as having more of a Mythbuster/practical physics mind..and I'm sure that would separate him from his brothers in terms of relate-able subject matter to discuss. Don is also the favorite turtle of Jesse Glenn (basis for my character Kenzie). Turtles are what brought Jesse & I together as friends, and I thought it would be fun to give Don a Kenzie-esque lantern-staff...but of course using NYC salvaged materials.

After searching for good sewer photos, I wasn't able to come up with something I liked, so I just drew a sewer with a vaulted ceiling. I was worried about all the perspective for the concentric circles the arched roof was made of. I was also worried about getting the spacing of the bricks right. So I quickly mocked up a sewer model to match my sketch using printed out sheets of a brick pattern conformed to the shape of the arched cardboard. I added a few dowels and straws to simulate steam and or electrical pipes that can run along the roof of sewers and drain pipes.

I printed my rough drawing above with a photo of the model substituted for my rough background drawing. I inked the piece on my lightbox using my rough & photo as a guide for the ink lines. Like usual, when inking I'm concerned with texture and line quality...how different patterns of line can suggest different textures or surfaces. For pens I'm now using Copic Multiliners, the same pens I'm using on Mouse Guard. I did a little bit to suggest the lighting with the ink (the cast shadow & the darker recesses of the sewer stippling into lighter foreground) but I wanted to save most of the lighting effects for the coloring.

The next step is to scan the inks and start 'flatting' which is the starting stage of coloring. Here I'm establishing areas of color..making the area that is Don's front shell different than the colors that are his arm or head or the sewer. Some color choices are made in this stage, but they could be all wrong on purpose if I wanted. The goal is to make sure that the different parts are all separated by a different color. Here I was pretty close and only made a few adjustments after I got into the rendering. I have to admit, even though I know the process, the flatness of these flats left me worried. I had envisioned a very atmospheric cover with a lot of depth and the flat colors showed that I had a long way to go to get there.

The last step was to render the piece. This means adding in all the shading and lighting effects and color holds and highlights. I was right when I thought it was going to be a long process from the flats to this point. There was a few hours of just tweaking the lighting and shadows until it was the right amount of contrast and glow.


Upcoming Appearances:
2012
London Super Con: Feb 25-26

Emerald City: March 30-April 1 

Boston Comic Con: April 21-22