Rough Pearl Page 25: Pitch Black Nothing



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Moon Prince Page 110: A Small Matter of Payment



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MoCCA 2012


If you happen to be in New York City this weekend I hope you'll drop by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival at the 69th Regiment Armory at 68 Lexington in Manhattan. I'll be there at the Big If/Blurred Books table signing copies of The Moon Prince and, as an extra special treat, Max, Molly and their momma Melissa (the Pirate Queen) will be there in the flesh on Sunday afternoon selling their very own comic books they made themselves! Here's a sneak preview of Molly's comic The Vampire:



Rough Pearl Page 24: Doooong!



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Moon Prince Page 109: What on Earth?

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A Rough Pearl Process Post

Here's an animation showing how I finished up the pencil drawing for the first page of The Rough Pearl.

First we see the "raw scan" of the drawing, then we see it once contrast has been added, followed by some "dodging" and "burning" to clean up graphite smears in some areas and punch up lines and shadows in others. I never use the actual "Dodge" and "Burn" tools in Photoshop - I use color correction Curve Layers (one with the midtones pulled up to brighten, one with the midtones pulled down to darken) controlled by Layer Masks.

Next I manipulate the drawing to fix compositional and proportion problems. I always flip the page (Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontal) as this helps me spot the areas that need fixing, then I usually use the Liquify filter to smoosh the areas around until I'm happy with them. Sometimes, as in the case of the woman's face on the computer monitor in panel one, I select individual areas and resize them with the Transform command. I also frequently draw in new details in Photoshop - for example, in panel three I needed to extend the image to replace a thought balloon I took out after deciding it made Adam sound too angry and misogynistic (he's only slightly angry and misogynistic).

Finally, I add color and refined lettering. The color is on a Layer set to Multiply and is controlled by a Layer Mask where I brush certain areas out to lighten and emphasize them.

Rough Pearl Page 23: Question Mark?



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Moon Prince Page 108: Splat!




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Another Process Post: Captain Adam Page 1

I just realized that this is the (eek!) 20th anniversary of my narrative collage, Captain Adam, which was made by cutting up various old comic books and magazines and combining the resultant pile of panels to make a new "story" which I re-drew so as to impose a modicum of legibility.

Captain Adam was printed with the help of an arts council grant up in my native Canada and wound up being distributed to comics shops (and even newsstands) all over North America via Vortex publishing, so literally hundreds of people probably picked it up, thought "what the hell is this? Is this supposed to make sense?" and put it back down. Ah, well.

On the left we see the final art for the first page of the story (with grey tones added digitally many years later when it was reprinted in Blurred Vision 2. On the right is the original collage. You can see higher rez versions of the whole story HERE, or if you're interested, you can actually buy a copy of Captain Adam HERE.

Rough Pearl Page 22: Stuck


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Moon Prince Page 107: Bolt the Door!



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Another Process Post: Page 61

Here's a little layout showing how page 61 of The Moon Prince (from May 20th last year) was created. This time, instead of making an animation, I just put four different versions of the page next to each other in a grid so as to make it easier to compare them all together.

On the upper left we see the scribbly “thumbnail page” where I wrote and roughly designed the page, then to the right of that the “collage” page where I combined photos of the models (in this case it was just me, and the pictures were all taken with the camera on my phone) and 3D renderings of the “aether ship” made using Google's free Sketchup software. The “aether ship” is based on different pieces (a zeppelin, aircraft parts, army furniture) which I downloaded from Google's fantastic “3D Warehouse” and combined and modified in Sketchup. Below them is the drawing based on the collage (which I made in Photoshop using a Cintiq monitor to draw directly onto) and the final colored version with the word balloons, also all done in Photoshop.

Stay tuned for the next pulse-pounding episode of The Moon Prince, this Friday!

Your Pal,
Kevin

Rough Pearl Page 21: Stupid Smug Sexist Shit


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