Scott Pilgrim Pin Up: Process thingy....

Ok, i'm going to try nd keep this short because my last post was quite lengthy. I made a print of Bryan ee O'Mlley's characters from his series 'Scott Pilgrim' to give to him as a gift and this is how i did it.
I started it late the night before (because i am a dumbass!) and began hashig out little thumbnails. I hated them all so sketched a Scott holding the sword on a sheet of A4 bristol board and decided it wasn't enough. So then i taped on another A4 sheet and drew te big Gideon head and added smokey-ness. I was going to leave it at that because i was in a rush but it still looked bare, so then i taped another sheet of A4 on the other side and added the angelic Ramona (Liz's idea). I decided i would flip Scott around in Photoshop so he was protecting her and inked the whole thing with a brush. I added the 6 other Evil Ex-BFs heads in last minute and inked them up too.

Then i scanned the sheets in and alligned them in a hurry. I cut and paste everything to be where i wanted them.

I then began blocking in colour (at this point i went to sleep and woke up early next morning to finish it).

I removed the pencil lines and put down the final colours which were mostly solids, then i added shades. I used some gradients on a few of the Exes and for the BG. I daubed on the smoke quickly with a big brush and added some liney light ray shiz in the background (i was going to try and make the background a similar pattern to that on the 4th book, but it didn't look right). Then i rushed to the printers, got it printed at an A1 length, then hurried off to Nottingham to deliver it! That's it!

I'm pretty proud of it. I've never combined traditional inking with digital coluring before but i really enjoyed it. In fact, workin on the novel i am really growing to love inking on it's own! More on that next time though!

I'm off out for buy-one-get-one-free cocktails and tapas, mmmmmm.....

Dan

P.S. Was in a wee car accident (sort of) on the way back from Notts, but thats a whole other story!

The BIG post!

Hey All! I know i've been really quiet on here lately, but there are many reason, the main one being; I'M SUPER BUSY! With work (which is still going amazing btw), a new web comic, my graphic novel and being sick, the last two weeks have been pretty manic. First of all:

Bryony James and I have finally started uploading our web comic which we've been working on for the last few months and now we have a few pages done we are confident we can start uploading and remain on schedule. We update every Monday and you can find out more at: http://www.sambooka-comic.com/

Second: I went to see BRYAN LEE O'MALLEY ( creator of Scott Pilgrim ) yesterday and it was a blast! For weeks before going i was planning on doing some fan art to give to him but then wasn't going to bother because i was already busy. Then at 9.30pm the night before going, my girlfriend Liz urged me to at least do a sketch otherwise i may regret it. I got to started right away and the above image is what i came up with. Considering the whole thing took about 4 hours i'm pretty proud of it, there'splenty i'd change but i'm going to do a process post on this piece at a later date. (Thank you Liz for making me do it x).

The signing was great, but he was on a tight schedule so it was quite brief. It was held at Page 45 in Nottingham, the only place in the UK which stocks the above poster,which i bought and got signed. Hurrah! The plan was to get all my books signed, but time was running short so i just got him to sign the poster which i want to get framed, shook his hand, gave him the print i made and said thanks for the books and to keep making great stuff.

LASTLY: AN UPDATE ON MY GRAPHIC NOVEL

The page count is at 15 at the moment and has been for the last week or so. I was ill last week so was spending my evenings trying to relax, so i'm not where i wanted to be at this point which was around 20 pages. I haven't posted any final images of it yet because the plan is to get as much of it done as i can before i show anything. This is because i don't want to get bored of the idea by talking about it all the time, i want to put all that energy into making it.

What i will say is: It's called 'I Live In A Robot', it's going to be roughly 150 pages, i'm doing it with brush and ink and adding greys, tones and letters digitally. I don't know how i'll be releasing it yet, wether i do it online, self publish/print it, or try to sell it to a publisher. The most important thing to me at the moment is to just get it finished.

If you've made it to the end of this post,

Thanks! And comment, let me know how you all are!

Dan

What's this?

Sleepy

I managed to sketch this at work, i don't know when or if i'll ever finish it, really busy between work and the graphic novel, but it's something to post.