Friday, September 18, 2009

The Ogre (by Jon Morris)


Had to share this great drawing my pal and cartoonist extraordinaire Calamity Jon Morris sent me this afternoon. For those of you out there who don't recognize this little guy, it's The Ogre, the main character from my Paranormal comic book trilogy.

Thanks to Jon for sending this along, it totally made my day. It's always fun to see how other artists draw your characters.

To see more of Jon's work, you can go check out his website right here.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Interview

An interview I did last week with the excellent French comic book website Klare Lijn International just went online today.

Feel free to check it out right here.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Drawing comics (according to me)

I was asked the other day to show how I draw comics, from sketch to finished page, so here goes :

I usually work from very small, very rough thumbnail sketches, which I then scan and enlarge to the size of my originals (for the curious, I usually work at or around 10 x 15-inch format or A3 format, but on my current project I'm using the smaller A4 format, which is pretty much the same size as a sheet of 8.5 x 11-inch paper).

I then print out the page on a sheet of typing paper and pencil over the rough sketches, making quite a few changes as I go. Then I lightbox the finalized drawings onto a sheet of smooth-surface, 250-grain bristol paper using a non-photo blue Col-erase pencil (although you can’t tell that by the following image, since I greyscaled it for better readability. Sorry...guess you’ll have to use your imagination if you want to see blue pencil linework this time around). Once the pencils are finished, I ink the panel borders and do the lettering (not shown) with an Ames lettering guide and Staedtler Marsmatic technical pens.

Now comes the fun part: inking. By far the part of drawing comics that I love the most. I ink my pages with a no.4 sable hair brush and Pébéo india ink, a relatively inexpensive ink that scans very well.

Once I’ve finished inking, I scan the page again, clean it up, do any tweaking that my brush or white-out didn’t catch, then color or greyscale the page. I should mention that the above page is far from finished, though, as I’ve just noticed about a half-dozen things that bother me, and which, in hindsight, looked better in the penciled version... so I need to go back and fix them. Soon.

But anyway, there you have it : the Cliff’s Notes version on how I draw comics!