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. 

Writer's regret

In art, you're meant to be able to rewrite all the mistakes that you made in life. But the more I look back at Scary Go Round from a point of years' remove, the more I see the glaring mistakes that I made. They're not "ran over a granny on a zebra crossing" type mistakes, more the permanently documented evidence of missed opportunities and mis-steps.

There's definitely a point in Scary Go Round where I start writing the comic that I think people want, rather than the one that I wanted to write. Don't worry, I couldn't have written that comic at the time even if I'd wanted to. I didn't have the tools, some might say "chops", to do so.

The biggest hole, for me, was at the heart of Esther and The Boy's relationship. It's expressed in such vague terms. The average story was 45 pages long, which didn't leave a lot of room to get to the root of the matter. It's only since writing the new comic that I've begun to understand some of those older characters properly.



Part of the reason that I wanted Bad Machinery to be about kids, and slower, was that I could look at these things more closely. I love drawing nutty things, but it's the interpersonal stuff that interests me when I write, more now than ever.

I used to try to fit as many firecrackers as I could into a comic's dialogue, now I'm more concerned with what I can leave out while saying as much as possible. Does that make sense?

In art, you can always go back, but it's best to press on. Endless revision is the domain of the insecure. I did do a couple of little drawings while I was thinking about this though. Perhaps you can see them.