Issue 2 Cover

Here are the inks and colours for the cover for issue 2.

Creator Owned Day

Today is officially Creator Owned Day, yet another indicator that creator-owned books seem to be currently looming large in the consciousness of the comics populace, both readers and creators. I'm delighted to embrace this fact, as this book is the first creator-owned property I've ever attempted, and I really hope/feel that it can be a big step in the right direction career-wise for me. As mentioned in previous posts, I was getting more and more frustrated at the lack of control/input in the work-for-hire realm, and working on my own story and characters has been a huge breath of fresh air. So viva la Creator Owned Day! Hopefully things like this will raise the profile of independent books in general and encourage more comics fans to stray a little from the beaten path and maybe give something else a try every now and again.

Here's the cover to the first issue with the logo included. The placement/colour scheme is still a little preliminary as I try different positions, but this is where it's at right now. I've completed the cover to the second issue too, so I'll stick a glimpse of that up here at some point soon.

Page 9 Thumbnail

 

Here's my original thumbnail layout for the page I recently posted. Thought it might be interesting to see how  the art starts out. I draw these things right onto the script usually, at pretty much the size you see here, then scan those in and arrange them on a page consisting of a grid of eight pre-ruled layout spots. I'll do any tweaking necessary on the thumbnails at this stage. After that I'll grab the required layout and blow it up to drawing size. I then print that out and lightbox the finished pencils from it. Sometimes I'll decide at that point that I think an aspect of the drawing could still be improved further, and will try a new element during the pencilling, like changing the angle of the dino's head on this page. This inevitably leads to a slightly muckier final page(in that it consists of an awful lot more erasing and re-drawing, I like to have most of that stuff worked out at the layout stage), but them's the breaks. Dunno if this seems laborious or not to others, but it's a system that works for me.

Page 9

Dino attack!
This is the last page of the preview, where the fit really starts to hit the shan. I'll continue to post coloured and lettered versions of these pages as they get finished. I'm currently inking page 17 (of 26) of issue 1, so loads more stuff that I can't wait for people to see down the line.

Page 8

Eighth page. One more after this and that'll be all of the preview pages from the first issue(9 of 24). I think the ninth page leaves it in a pretty tantalising place, all going according to plan.

Page 7

Page 7. I know I posted this a while back, but here it is again in the interests of keeping the pages in order.

Page 6