Blackaby

After I first joined Keenspace there was a period when my account simply wasn't working (and was eventually deleted by their funky servers). So while lurking the forums I ran into Rachel Astruc who was a the writer for the comic "Blackaby", who was looking for guest artists to do some pages.

These pages also mark the first real project I did with my Intuos3 tablet. I think it worked well. There are problems with proportions here and there (Blackaby himself is a nightmarish character to draw since he has neither nose nor eyebrows). It's just something you have to accommodate for when using a tablet because you're zooming in so often and not looking at the big picture as much as with a piece of paper.

Unfortunately this also meant I was ransacking any sense of continuity in Rachel's comic for the sake of my own experimentation. The pages are not only of varying quality but completely different styles. Most are simple cell shadings done completely in Macromedia Flash, but page 1 and 2 used other programs. I messed with Terragen for the first time and can recommend it for excellent quick landscapes. Though presently it doesn't do organic material or volumetric skies it can turn out fairly realistic results.

None the less I ran page 2 through a few Photoshop filters to cheat myself out of some painting practices (the city lights and towering smoke are all that's actually painted). Page 6 is completely colored in Corel Painter, making it kind of a sore thumb. Various 3d programs were also used to make the couch, the gate in the last page and the volumetric lighting on page 6. I think all could have been blended better.

Some of you might recognize the name of the village mentioned in the 2nd page. Do a search on "The Beast of Gévaudan" and you'll understand the context of the character a little better. You could also watch "Brotherhood of the Wolf" for a more fantastical telling of the story.

Ironically, and unfortunately enough, the last 2 pages I drew, and therefore the ones which arguably have the best line work, are the black and white bookend pages. I started using the tablet almost exactly when I first took the project on, and various revisions of the cover page made it the last one, when I had more experience and better control of the tablet pen. The script called for a cover page of "Wolf" looking beat up and drunk. I thought it'd be better to hide the monsters identity until Roland's line about the couch, so I made the second version which was inspired by lithographs made for newspapers during the time of the real Gevaudan incident.

It simply slipped by me that since the other monster in the story is a vampire, this second cover would also betray the monster's identity (I realize it's not a story of high suspense, but you've got to try). So the third version was made, completely ambiguous (not counting the hinting shape of the eyes), considerably darker, and probably the better version. It also reminded me of a need for a new computer. This final vector image was so complex my computer would stall for a full second after each stroke of the brush.

Anyway, it was fun and made me wish more comic artists out there would trade off their skills from time to time, it's good to try different things occasionally.