CATTLECARS designs

Between watching Mad Max and its sequels/imitators, reading Kamandi, and wanting to work through my actual (though steadily diminishing) fears of a robot uprising, I've had a flurry of subjects swirling around in my head that I'd like to see through to a story but whose elements were so disparate that I could find no narratively credible way to approach including them all.

A week or two ago, though, something clicked: one single narrative reason that made muscle cars, cowboys, trucks, killer robots, and animal people all an intrinsic part of this narrative world.  So I spent a good amount of time this weekend (at the table before setup, on the train, etc) working through these ideas and the first couple of days back sketching them up.  Here are some of those sketches.

Anyway, it's something I could do in very short installments, rather than as one long narrative, so I'll be able to do things with it concurrently with other projects.  And while drawing cars is a pain, it's also a whole lot of fun, and working on the Creeps showed me that it's something I need in my wheelhouse.  So I'll probably start posting up the odd story or design thing here and there in the not-too-far-off future.

Cave Sequence: Color Keys

One of the sequences/acts/whatever in my 2nd Crogan Adventures book, Five Years’ Service (titled Crogan’s March on its initial publication) is  forty-something-page-long section that takes place in a cave, the only lighting source a torch.  

BECAUSE it’s all in a cave, it’s easy to feel like it’s one long scene, rather than the four (possibly five) distinct scenes that compose it.  In reworking the book for color, I picked a panel from early in each scene and colored it in a way that it (hopefully) feels different from the other:   

the first, the introduction of the cave, is very matter of fact, literal, to suit the feel of this new mess they’ve gotten themselves into.

The second introduces a danger, and I thought the fire palette would best highlight the stress that arrives with it.

The third scene becomes scary, a little more otherwordly, so I pushed the purple,

and the final is where lines start to become blurred, both in terms of personal allegiances and what our perceptions of the reality of the dangers that they face are, and so I wanted to align the purple and the orange of the immediately preceding scene, bring them closer together in value and saturation, which creates this nice rich jewel tone that suits the Arabian Nights thing that’ll play out over the next few pages.

So now what I’ll do is sample FROM these color key panels to do the remainder of each scene.

New coloring process

New process method!  Thought I’d share.
1: Inks, the regular old way.
2. I lightbox the inks and do a basic watercolor job on a blank sheet of paper
3. I lay the line art over the watercolors digitally, then go in with a digital watercolor brush (the Kyle Webster “wamazing” brush) and touch up details.  I also darkened the value inside the bunker.
4. That would have been it, but the other focal points in the comic - planes - were colored flat digitally, and those two guys stood out like sore thumbs, so I colored them flat digitally to match the other panels.  The final panel is how my future historical stuff is likely to look; digital focal characters, watercolor background (and background characters).

It’s a little cumbersome, scanning twice, but I think that it’s faster than digitally coloring all of the elements of an environment, and it kind of has an old-school 2D animation look to it, which I like.  Speed is super important.  I want to make as many comics as possible but I don’t want to sacrifice quality, so any method that potentially yields quicker results is a big win.