A month or two back, Mark and I got the opportunity to chat about our graphic novel Gigs with Brian Hibbs from Comix Experience.
The video of that conversation is up on YouTube now, and here's the link - go give it a look ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dumyQJMqRZQ&t=4s
I'm back working on the next thing - here's a little rough drawing from a sketchbook.
In this new book he's the guy who operates the Twyford ferry...
So here's a video that shows the construction of one of the pages from the book.
Some things that I need to say up front - this sequence shows how the pages are constructed, but doesn't really represent my process, which is waaaaay messier than you might think from just watching this.
Also, each page in Gigs took around three days to make (this film comes in at about 76 seconds!)
And this page is possibly the simplest in the whole book (a single panel, with a very limited colour palette) - pretty much every other page is a lot more complex than this one :)
You'll see here that I start with a pencil drawing. (I work @150% - I'll reduce the image for print after it's all finished)
This drawing gets scanned into Photoshop @600dpi, and then I'll drop it into a new CMYK document as a semi-transparent layer ...
After that I put a background layer of flat colour underneath it and from there I ink it all digitally using a very old and battered Wacom Bamboo tablet. In Photoshop I mainly use a hard round brush tool, 6pt., though I'm not averse to the gradient and soft round airbrush tools as well...
Usually there are several layers of black line art - I think of each scene as having at least a foreground, middle distance and background - often there are more depths stacked in there.
Everything gets flatted with base colours and then I hatch/scribble layers of highlight and shadow on the coloured layers to give things a bit of heft and weight and mass. Most of this colouring goes in underneath the black line art layers.
I'll usually include some layers of 33% black just to scuzz the image up a bit and give the background elements some texture (in this case, it's mainly about the brickwork)
Then there are layers of highlight to make the bulbs glow, and the sound effects - again using a reduced opacity to give the image more depth.
The final slide here shows the outline added to the foreground figures - it's a tiny thing really, but it does just lift them away from the rest of the image slightly.
I have a few projects that are about to see the light of day, and I want to tell you about them here. (At some point, I may indulge in crude emotional blackmail in order to get you to buy them - so there's something to look forward to :D )
Gigs is a 270+ page graphic novel that My writer mate Mark and I first began discussing in the Spring of 2019 - it's been a long time coming :)
Published by the excellent folk at Top Shelf, it's due out next June; but in the meantime, there are preview pages available to view in their online catalogue here...
So I've got a big graphic novel coming out next year.
Written by Mark Mosedale and drawn, lettered and coloured by me, it'll be published by Top Shelf.
I'll be promoting the hell out of it when it lands :)
In the meantime though, I'm working on another one, this time with my mate Simon Hall on writing duties.
It's too early to say much about it - we're only about 20 pages in - but it's going quite well I think.
Here's some photos from my desk today, showing my (possibly unintelligible) process as I wrangle the pagination and panelling.
