Backburner Frontwarmer

It's been a few years since I put out my own book. I've learned a lot since then, about a lot of things. Most importantly though, it's been asking for help.

I hate asking for help. It makes me feel insecure, stupid and incompetent when the truth is very literally the opposite. Nobody is a master of everything, and different people's experience and insights can provide solutions to problems you might not even be aware of.

Nothing good is ever made by one person alone, and to forego getting help is to sacrifice the quality of the product you're trying to make. I'm waiting to hear back from a select few people I trust. Frankly, I'm terrified.

But something my brother once said to me, and it's stuck in my brain since;

"There's no comfort in the growth zone, and no growth in the comfort zone. "

I'm looking forward to this, though. My last goal for the year is to put out an art book, and that's gone through some iterations as to what exactly that would be but now is settling into something I'll (hopefully) be proud of until I resentfully try and top it with whatever I do next. 

The process of its creation will be quite public, and once I have the script locked down I'll be doing regular streams and updates on the project with character designs, background designs and- depending on what the final medium is to be- actual building of the pages all on camera. 

If I go the short film route, it'll be the basis of the 'Art of' book, which is something I've always wanted to make and if it's a comic there'll be more to watch. 

Either way, I'm pumped, and I hope you guys like it too. 

Back in the swing

I've a number of different skillsets under my belt, and they overlap in strange and wonderful ways. I work as a background artist, illustrator and comic colourist. From a layman's perspective, they could come off as being more or less the same thing.

I'm back colouring comics for the first time in a while, and as always, the first page is always painful to work through. Firstly, it's the only job I do where I'm not technically drawing anything. Everything else allows building, adding, fixing.

Colouring has you in a purely supportive role; what has been done before you is set in stone and that is what you work with. I've worked with artists of many different skill levels and you can see in the great ones how much time and consideration has been put into the visual weight of each element. Even doing colour holds upsets that balance, and you are literally messing with their storytelling.

Over a longer run, a rapport and understanding can be built in an art team, and you can tell where you can push the envelope or where to play it safe. Page 1 though, it's still too soon to know, so it's safe all the way.

Technically, there's different tricks to flatting and colouring other people's lines and this takes a while to get used to, and learning how to compliment each artist's visual language.
It's not uncommon for me to colour a first page two or three times, just so I get used to the lines, the tone of the story and what is feasible to get done under deadline. Putting in that work early on will save you from going over the top and overburdening yourself later on.

For some of the more novice art teams, the penciller is still getting used to the story as well, so page one will usually host a lot of superfluous traits that may be honed as the book progresses. Things like how clean the lineart is, resolutions, borders and so on are for a lot of people mistakes yet to be made and usually will only be made once. So teams grow, and get better, and great books get made.

There are some small things that make life incredibly awkward for people further down the chain This is why I recommend that anyone wanting to work in any creative collaborative field should try AS MANY of the different disciplines in their field as possible. Harper Lee said it best

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

I've immense respect for everyone in every part of the comics machine, and I do my best to give as much leeway as possible in any project I work on. After all, it is a process, sometimes clunky at first but can become a great adventure that lets you do cool and different things. Already, three pages in today it's like the gears have been greased and I'm back having fun.

Speaking of which, it's time to get back to work :D

Broken

Couldn't let the finale pass without doing SOMETHING to mark it. Some Heisenberg for you.

-C

Blogger I'm cheating on you

I'm trying to get my website overhauled, so I'm looking into wordpress, some from scratch-HTML builds and one or two new suprises. In the meantime, here's an update on that picture I was working on the other day.
The thing about this approach is you really need to slow down and be methodical. I got sloppy on this one early on and ended up rendering a bit on my flats layer, which bit me in the ass later on. Also, I need to refine that when I work in thinner lines I should up my resolution so that my filling scripts don't go haywire which is sort of what happened here.
Learning though; got to play with some depth dissociation through colour here. Also got to  play with brush shapes and try driving a subtle more graphic approach in an otherwise painty landscape.
All going well I'll be doing a lot of painting next week, so hopefully I'll be nicely warmed up by the time it get to my evening-tide excursions.
I can't wait. But first, I depart on holiday with the family. I doubt there'll be any internet, but I will be doing up some pictures to be sold at DICE next weekend.

...or I'll do some dramatic watercolours of the Atlantic coast.


...wow, both of them sound fun.

Through the Woods WIP

A few months ago I did a loose little doodle that I was quite happy with, and I'm finally getting around to giving a proper going over. I'm looking to capture the approach of some of my day-job stuff and mix it with my own colour palettes and little flourishes, so this is a bit experimental.

I usually fine line my character work, but looking through my personal environment work I seem to stick to splodges of colour and refining as I go. As a technique I love that approach- changes are instantaneous and nothing is ever locked down, right up until the final save. In animation production, however, lines get signed off on first so everything has to be thought out and placed first.

There are definitely benefits to this approach; once you finish the linework it's exactly like a comics workflow in many respects. I've worked out some quick ways to flat out pages in colour, and they all apply in situations like this.
Also, with everything planned you can line out seperate planes for easier rendering later on. This doesn't help *that* much for me because if I'm being clean, I always refer to my flats for selections anyway. If I do go lineless later on, it'll still stand to me. Similarly, line holds are much easier to manage.

The biggest disadvantage is it drawing a line in the sand in terms of design. About 3/4 of the way through doing those trees (all the background, and half of the foreground) I thought 'what if they were all curled and gnarled, and the stones were taller so it draws the eye more'...not much use to me after an hour or two of inking.Were I just splodging along in paint I'd have painted straight over, but my hands were tied unless I wanted to draw a whole lot of trees all over again.

So for finished designs, yay it's a win, but for evolving designs on the page it's an absolute killer.

I'll update again with this as I go, and it should be interesting to see how the rendering process will be affected. Fingers crossed!

-C

Streaming Done!

Was streaming earlier at  www.livestream.com/charco - hopefully it'll become a regular event from here on out.

I had a blast, and thanks to everyone who stopped by and spread the word.

Here's where I'm at on this, definitely closer but a long ways off being happy with it. Had a LOT of fun designing the lizard creatures, will definitely do this back-and-forth creature vs landscape design thing again. Yeah, this is fun. I'm actually really looking forward to the polishing pass.

Some quick things I've learned on this
-Name your layers. FROM THE START
-Grouping objects/layers is your friend.
-Starting off with a greyscale render is fine but it loses oomph when you try and convert it to colour. Still trying to work around it. Doing a colour thumb on another layer before you render your greys definitely helps.
-I need to play around constructively with channels some more. I have ideas that SHOULD be simple that I can't quite do without just painting it out straight.
-Preparation is ALWAYS worth it.

I love this part

The one thing I'm always very wary of when I'm working in-studio is finding time to work on my own things. Doodles are doable, and the odd bit of sketchbook work is definitely feasible, but it takes a significantly greater scheduling commitment to dedicate seven or eight hours on a finished pic.

Hence, I've been doing a lot of cel shaded stuff and speedpaints as of late, but I'm trying out a new approach and giving about an hour to any night I'm home to chipping away at a bigger picture. My initial brief to myself was much more constricting, and that'll reveal itself in time but for now it's all about putting in the time and getting something done that's just for practice and just for me.

So I've been working on this the last two nights. at about an hour a night, and I realised that THIS is my favourite part. Not the thumbnailing or the finishing, but where you get to go in and add the visual style to a picture.  Right now I'm going all CURVY SPIKY with everything, in honour of Mr Lizard who will probably be redesigned to suit his environment when I'm done with the rest. Actually rendering out surfaces and finishes has its own unique glee, but this is where it feels most like I'm putting my own stamp on a picture.

That's sort of the point with personal stuff. Stamping yourself on the page

Anyways, all going according to plan there'll be updates on this picture as it nears completion (WAY off yet) and I'll have a little WIPPY GIFFY thing to go with it in case anyone's interested as well as some master studies and whatever else I think is super important and needs to be done before laundry and other practical things.

If anyone has any suggestions of artists (or architects, philiosophers, or ANY field) that you think are cool/relevant/worth looking at, please let me know! Knowledge is power and all that jazz :D