Pencil & gray tone to final color.

Here's a pencil and grey-tone combo sample panel from issue one. The book will be in color, so this is the second to last phase of the final art. The stage between this and coloring is a quick pass of digital painting to tighten, alter and clean as needed.

Some Initial thumbnails.

Here are some enlarged views of a few panels worth of thumbnails. The top one is from issue 1 and the bottom is from issue 2. I'll probably post several of these, but I don't want to show enough to give the story away (so, no full-page versions or anything like that.).

Process Test

I'm doing my thumbnails digitally in grey tones, but I want the book to have some loose line and a nice textural quality. These things can also technically be done digitally, but I wanted to get some traditional materials involved as well. Plus, one of the downsides of using the digital medium exclusively is the dark magic of the ZOOM! If you're not careful, you can spend time on details that end up being insignificant in print-size, so it's always nice to go traditional on a life-size (or enlarged) page.

These were done back in '09 as well. I was experimenting with how I wanted the finals to come together. What is seen here is A.) Enlarged digital thumbnail. B.) Graphite pencil on 11X17 bristol. C.) Charcoal rub on newsprint. D.) Bringing all the elements together in Photoshop. Detailing and coloring digitally.

I've since moved away from doing the graphite and charcoal separately. Instead, I'm drawing my line with a combination of Prismacolors (all black) on vellum. The Col-Erase, The Verithin, and the (straight-up) colored pencil, adding texture with the Nupastel and a Webril pad. You get varying shades of darkness and detailing quality with each and they do better together than if you were to use any of them by themselves.

The end results are basically identical to my initial experiments anyway and I've gained the advantage of drawing all on one piece of material while also achieving a more immediate saturation result with the Prismacolors versus the graphite.

Setting!

The story takes place in the early 10th century in an area that is now the southeastern edge of the Austrian Alps. Here's a shot of the mountainside where most of the story is set (on or around).

Initial Character Sketches

So these are the initial sketches of the main character Burlyn ("Burly") done back in '09. I've been steadily moving forward on this book since then. I'll be getting most of the book finished before pitching it to publishers (hence the "slow-leak" exposure of materials on this development blog). 'Coward' was the working-title back then, but that's a great comic by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips so I obviously had to change the name.