The Conjurers

Here’s another look behind the curtain on making a webcomic, or at least on how I do it. This is the grey stage. It’s the hardest part for me as I always want to charge ahead and splash colors all over everything and be done with it. That always ends in a mess.

Not that this won’t end in a mess, but by having a process in place, I’ll be able to improve the art over time and get it to where I want it. In this step I flatted all the figures. That means coloring them in with just grey.

After that, I throw in some subtle shadows and highlights. Subtle is the key word and it’s the hardest part of this hardest part.

The backgrounds are combos of vectorized photos and some square brush work. I’m trying to push the style towards something I’m not comfortable with which means further away from attempting to draw pure realism. A little abstraction adds some energy methinks.

And you can see just the inks in this post from a few days ago: http://theconjurers.com/the-webcomic-is-real/

Finally, a few finished (but still rough) pieces to show you. This is just a sample cover idea. I think, for the final color illustrations, I’ll be doing a more involved, painted style. For now, it remains in the comic book realm.

In this step I dropped in subtle shadows and highlights. Keyword “subtle”. I always make the mistake of hacking in shadows and highlights and the end result is usually a horrid mess. Over the years, I’ve studied other painters and comic colorists and learned how just a slight color change makes a huge difference. For now the name of the game is control and preventing myself from rushing.

This step will get some more tweaks until I’m relatively happy. Then on to texturing.