Carson Grubaugh: Working On SDOAR

I talked to Dave on the phone this week about Strange Death Of Alex Raymond. 

The plan is to work together Marvel-Style. He has provided me a with very open framework to create the bridging pages within. When I am done with them he will add "dialogue" as he sees fit. I have some fun ideas about how everything is going to flow and per Dave will be sharing the progress of the pages I work on here at AMOC.

That in said, here is a pretty thorough look at the process for what will be page 1.

Dave had Sandeep send me this mock-up of what he saw the page looking like, as well as a number of photo reference images of Kitchener to work with.

I took those images into Photoshop and rotated the photos so that the verticals were parallel with the the paper. This led to some tangent edges I did not like in the area where Dave has the gutter cutting through the car. After some playing around I decided to move it over to the right. Otherwise, I tried to match what I saw as closely as possible.

Then I traced the major forms in Photoshop using my mouse and the line tool for straight lines and my Wacom tablet (a crappy little Bamboo) for everything else. The idea at this stage is to get placement and proportion set since that is, for me, the part of drawing that is most likely to go awry. This also  saves having to set up vanishing points and all of the tedious, time-consuming work that goes into drawing linear perspective.

I chop the image up into bits that I print out on regular printer paper. Using clumsy inking tools, Microns and some Japanese brush-pens that have refillable ink cartridges, I "pencil" the image. (I have only had these brush pens for a year now and they changed everything! Anyone interested can go to jetpens.com and take a look around. They have all kinds of refillable nib and brush pens from Japan). There are a number of reasons I do my "pencils" in ink:

1. It lets me get a better sense of how the value relationships actually look. It isn't perfect, as anyone who followed the three "tryout" pages I did could see. The microns don't get anywhere near as thin as a nib or a brush, and I am not taking the time to do careful weaves of hatching. It is a lot better than pencils, though.
2. The brush pen lets me create shapes and areas of black closer to the way they will look with a real brush. It keeps the drawing loose and more lively. Doing this with a pencil would let me error on the side of way-too-tight.
3. Having all my lines in black allows me to scan and print the image back out for the next step with better results.

 

Here are the three sections of "pencils" combined into a page layout:

Click the image to enlarge!

I scan these in, drop them into place over top of my original tracing, plunk a layer of 80% opaque white on it in Photoshop, flatten the image, adjust the color balance to -100, -100, +100 (Pure Cyan, Pure Magenta, and Pure Blue), and then lighten everything by about 60-70 % depending on how much detail it looks like that is causing me to lose. I know that sounds like a lot of work but it takes about twenty seconds. If I were smart I could just automate this process as an action in Photoshop and do the whole thing in one click. Why am I not doing that?! Anyway, I get an image that looks like this:

 

I get this printed onto a piece of Canson brand Bristol-board. A cheap desktop ink-jet printer works as long as it can handle the 11 x 17 size. Ink-jet prints do not affect how the paper takes India-ink during the inking phase. Laser prints put a coat of toner over the whole sheet, which gives you really crisp nib lines but is awful for brush stokes as the paper does not absorb the ink properly. The ink also dries slower on the laser prints, and if anything is the devil it is slow-drying ink.

The idea with this whole process is that the light-valued print works like a non-reproducible blue pencil, without the terribly waxiness of those pencils so it is easier to ink over. When I scan the inks the print-out is light enough that it goes away during the curve adjustments that turn everything into pure blacks and whites.

From here I ink, using mostly Hunt 102 nibs and the Windsor Newton Series 7 # 2 brush. Classics. I am starting to get the hang of the Gillott 290/291 and 303 nibs, and may start using those as well. Dave is not joking when he talks about how impossible the 290 can be. The 291 seems like pretty much the same thing but less of a pain to use. Or maybe it is the other way around. I have a hard time reading the tiny little engraving. Ha-ha. One of the two sucks to use, the other is fine.

This page hasn't been printed or inked yet. Cliffhanger!