Tuesday, September 06, 2011

Blame The Sky cover process post

I haven't blogged much lately but I thought this might make a nice little process post. Here's the process for working on the new cover for Blame The Sky, which I just added to my e-book shop. If you like e-books, why not buy it? It can't hurt, can it?

Here's my original sketch, which I did with a ball point pen while cooking some rice. It didn't take very long.


I then began to painstaking trace my original in Illustrator. Flaws in the original sketch soon become evident when you add solid colours .


Once I was done tracing, I refined and juggled around shapes until people looked like they were meant to. Tessa and Rachel are characters I've hardly drawn in the last five years, so I had to do a bit of revision in order to capture their attitude. Amy was easy. Apart from how she barely looks like she did then at all.


Here's the new cover next to the original. The original was never very good. I was capable of a lot better even back then, but I didn't know how to lay out an effective cover so I would often do something rather stiff-looking, just to get it done. 


Despite hardly drawing anything in Illustrator since 2006, I can produce a far nicer illustration from it now than I ever could back then. It's a great program to produce a sharp-looking drawing from, but fresh hell to work in day-in, day out if you want to produce organic looking comics. 

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh, I missed you!

pascal said...

What are you using, instead of Illustrator, for the Scary Go Round webcomic? Photoshop? (because I had the impression the PDF comics from the shop were all vector graphics, or are these just very high resolution bitmaps?)

Anonymous said...

I see the angry, winged whale did not make the final cut.

Hey, there. I'm Esther Kim, the gal at SPX who asked you to choose your favorite Goats character and then tell me what you would write on his tombstone. I just wanted to thank you for taking the time out to answer and let you know that your answer is up on my blog, http://districtofgeeks.wordpress.com/