I’ve played along with a few of the other weekly themes over at Comic Twart, but my schedule hasn’t allowed the time to finish any of them yet. One or two of these might get finished off someday…

Over at ComicTwart they are doing an Al Williamson Tribute. I don’t follow the ComicTwart Blog regularly, though I should as a few friends are involved.

Al Williamson was a huge influence on me at a time in the the early ’90’s when my work was making the transition from promising amateurishness to early pro-level (though, oddly enough it was after I crossed that threshold that work started to be harder to find) and for a time drawing as much like Al Williamson as I could without slavishly swiping was the goal. I’ve moved away from that in the last ten years or so, though more due to the subject matter of the work I do than any loss of interest in the Alex Raymond/Hal Foster school of Art that Al synthesized so well.

Anyway, the Comic Twart theme of the week got me inspired and I decided to join the fun. I sketched this out last night in between pages of script of the latest storyboard. If I can squeeze in the time, I’ll try to ink it before the end of the week.

EDIT – Here are the inks fresh off the tablet!

Over-sized mushrooms and little spotted lizards say “Al Williamson” to me!

Another page of digital pencils. This one was done in July. I’m currently working on page 159 but my productivity slowed to a crawl when I started my current storyboarding gig. I went from a page a day to a panel or two a week. But – unlike other ‘breaks’ I’m still plugging away. And my current schedule has a week off after every two boards, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to play catch up during the weeks off. I’m still hoping   to have the pencils complete early in the new year and inks done by mid-summer.

I’ve hit the part of the story where I really can’t show full pages without spoilers, so from now on it’ll be a panel here and there for show and tell.

And… here’s page 144, drawn in Manga Studio:

So, yesterday I showed a random page of pencils using my newish digital technique. I was thinking that to show my process I would live blog a step by step of each stage. I never quite got around to it, but I did take a screen cap every few steps so you can get the idea of the process.

So, first I start off with a blank template page with faint grid marks for a 6, 9, 8 and 12 panel grids. Then I start sketching out my thumbnails. This can involve moving panels around, shrinking them, blowing them up, or moving them to another page altogether to make room for what I need. sometimes I’ll do a few different angles of a panel saving each on a separate layer so I can pick my favorite later. This one turned out pretty straight forward.

Then I reduce the opacity of the ‘thumbnail’ so I can see better and start drawing, panel by panel.

When I’m done, I make any last minute adjustments You can see that I shifted the middle tier up a smidge to make room for the dialog in the bottom tier. Then I make the panel borders and we’re done and ready for lettering and inking.

There a few more steps in between, but they’re hard to show. I’ll often keep characters on separate levels so I can scribble and erase and transform one without affecting the other. But, that’s basically all there is to it.