Friday, May 14, 2010

More Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom Press: An Interview with Writer Peter Hogan
Comicbookresources.com has posted an interview with Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom writer Peter Hogan! Click HERE to read it, and see below for some more preview pencil art...

Also: Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1 has a Robots of Doom preview in the back featuring the cover and the preview pages I linked to earlier this month. Kind of cool and surprising to find the preview there when I finally saw the Batman comic a couple of days ago!

--C

4 comments:

smoky man said...

great art, man! :)

a big Italian ciao
smoky

Eduard said...

Wow!! How do you manage to draw those ellypses? Just by hand? It's impressive!!

Another small question, looking at your drawings, with such a clean line, I can assume that you first draw in a different paper and then trace it in the final paper with a light-screen or similar. Then (if my assumption is correct) doesn't this way of working represent the same amount of work as it would be directly inking on the final paper?
The result you obtain is really wonderful, anyway. Your pencils are awesome!

Warm greetings from Spain!
Eduard

Chris & Xan said...

Thanks, guys! Eduard: I do use a lightbox to transfer my layouts to the finished page. See the following older posts here on this blog for an illustrated look at my actual working process, including a photo of the transfer process:

http://sprousenet.blogspot.com/2008/02/creating-comic-book-page-for-number-of.html

http://sprousenet.blogspot.com/2008/02/creating-comic-book-page-for-number-of_07.html

http://sprousenet.blogspot.com/2008/02/creating-comic-book-page-for-number-of_15.html

Don't forget to click on all the images for larger versions!

As for the amount of work, it is fairly involved, but I don't ink my own pages and I don't want to, so I just do finished pencils from the layouts. As you can see if you visit the links above, my layouts aren't so tight and finished that they could just be inked over. At least to me, they look unfinished and quite messy, with many characters having multiple limbs and the backgrounds are very loose and unfinished. I don't even use a straight-edge when doing layouts! So, at this stage I think another refining step (finished pencils) is necessary. When I do ink commissions and con sketches, I do far less pencilling, as you suggest.

--C

Eduard said...

Thank you for those links, they were very clarifying!

Your drawings are truly inspiring for me. I work at the european comic book market, so my style is definitely more europe-ish, but I would dare to say that your artwork is the most european from the greatest american artists (you may have been told that a thousand times in european cons... ;-) with such clean lines and traces. And although the narrative and composition is totaly american, your final rendering is quite "ligne claire".

I still find very impressive how you manage to get from the layouts to a such clean pencils. They could work themselves as inks!
In fact I did that in my last comic book, I used the pencils directly as inks (although I also applied some watercolors for coloring) as you can see here (sorry, not in english...):

http://edutorrents.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/pas-a-pas/

I guess that in the end, it doesn't matter whether you use pencils or inks, the amount of work might always be similar.
Well, these are very interesting reflections that you have inspired me!

Thanks again and greetings!
Eduard