The Conjurers

As most of you know, I’m hard at work on polishing up the pitch for the novel. At the same time I am also working on the webcomic side of things, simply because A: I want to launch the comic this year, and B: I want to include a sample in the novel pitch.

So I thought I’d share the inks to page one of episode one. I’m not completely sold on the style, but I think I’ll let it improve and grow organically from here on out. Also, haven’t made the final decisions on colors, but I do know I want a painterly effect for the backgrounds (that’s why I haven’t drawn backgrounds in some of the panels.

And on a side note, I need to go clarify the about page. Bit confusing on what exactly “The Conjurers” is.

I have a few processes going on right now because, well, I’m working on a bunch of them right now. This is a step from the sample cover illustration from the novel. At this stage, I’ve laid down all the flats. So now, I can focus in on specific areas one at a time.

It also makes it easy to select certain areas later on. If I want to lay in lighting effects behind the playing card, I can click on that layer and use it to mask out whatever is supposed to be behind the car.

In the next update, I’ll show you what it looks like with all the grey shadows and highlights finished.

Rough photo of the rough pencils for the webcomic cover. This is Savachia, the star of the first story arc in the comic. He’s a secondary character in the novel (an important one though) and we’ll get to see how he ended up in the Conjurian in the first webcomic series.

He’s a little bit of David Blaine and a dash of Criss Angel. More importantly, he’s not what you initially think.

Hark! A new post! Indeed it is. Rather staggering when I look back at when I first started “The Conjurers”. It has been a wild road. Between then and now, I’ve published two books and have another picture book wrapped and ready for release next fall. Wedged in their also is book one for “Fussbucket” and of course the daily chronicles of Doug and Sophie.

So where am I now? In short I’m finishing up another from scratch pitch for “The Conjurers”. It consists of three chapters of text and a few sample illustrations. And that is what I’ll be documenting here, starting now. There’ll be posts on the re-writing process and, once my agent has something to show, bits and pieces about the hopeful sale of the novel.

Let’s kick it off with the most recent piece of art. These are the preliminary inks for an illustration of the mansion at the beginning of the book. I’ve gone around the block multiple times on what style i want to use, and I think I’m close. The initial drawings are loose, sketchy but detailed inks. From there I’ll scan it in, add some grey washes in photoshop and a stylized border to fit the tone of the book. Seems like a lot of work to make a drawing look relatively haphazard and a touch sloppy.

Stay tuned. Lots more to come.

Work is under way for the webcomic. Here’s a sample piece in progress.