Saturday 12 February 2011

Bad photos of first pencils

The most annoying thing about working with a large format (A3) is that I can't scan my pages at home. The scanner is A4. So you get some bad photos instead. Sorry about that. The light has been bad for the past few days, so that didn't help the quality either. In any case, here is proof of the fact that I'm working on the 11-page episode "The Sword of Kings" to find out whether my new style works - and can be sustained for lots and lots of pages.

Not being able to do my own scanning is very annoying, but on the other hand, I can't remember how I ever managed to draw comics in A4. I have become fully reconciled with A3 - and in fact I sometimes wish my originals could be even larger XD.


(click for full view)
Slightly re-designed Uther, more British and more fifth-century than before :).
The 'Sword of Kings' was based on the sword of the so-called Lord of Oss. That means it is at least 1,000 years old when it comes into Uther's possession. (The original was 200 years old when it was buried with the Lord of Oss, so why not?)

(click for full view)
Look, it's the Giant Herdsman! I love to draw him. The perspective and the beasties were a challenge, though.

Next stage: transfer le tout to watercolour paper, then ink, then paint. Finally: add speech bubbles and text in Illustrator. Clearly, we're not done yet. I'm going to do all the pencils first, though. I like the idea of letting the pencilled pages lie around for a while, to leave room for possible corrections. I rarely spot my mistakes at first sight, so a little distance can't be bad.

3 comments:

Cecilia said...

There's a trick to assemble an A3 scanned in pieces: scan one first half and then the second half at the same resolution, save and open in photoshop, then click file -> automate -> photomerge. This should put the two halves together.

ampersand said...

Thanks for the tip! I'll try, but I'm thinking I'd have to scan very, very precisely. The two pieces would have to fit perfectly.

Cecilia said...

That method should actually allow you to make Photoshop do the work of fitting them for you - it should be able to recognize where the two halves mix together.
(At least, this is what I'm told).