process: drowning city cover sketches

Peggy
February 6, 2015

Today I started seriously fooling around with the site style for The Drowning City. After some work on the computer, I decided I needed to work out the image for the landing page – essentially, the cover of the book. So I grabbed a sketchbook and a pen, and sat down…

“Hey maybe we should establish that it’s set in New Orleans.” Yeah that’s a good idea. Except I think I want the logo in front of the skyline, not below it.

That’s going somewhere I guess. But what do I put in front of it?

Maybe a rear view of Alecto sitting in a window, looking out at the city? Man I dunno that’s kinda boring.

Inspiration flagging, I picked up the book I got yesterday. This is a couple pages from Sergio Toppi’s “The Collector”. Last year I’d gotten “Sharaz-De”, his version of the Arabian Nights, which was full of wild pages along these collage-y lines, and was curious to see how he’d handle a story that wasn’t an adaptation. He uses a lot more panels in this than he did in the very storybook-y “Sharaz-De”, but it’s still definitely very inspiring in terms of full-page design.

Yeah, that’s a lot better. We’ve got the main character, we’ve got the sword that’s important to the plot, we’ve got, um, I dunno, some of the other characters plopped around there. Time to explore further.

Zoom in to give myself more detail. Definitely starting to get somewhere here; I like the sketch of the woman with the gun in the upper right, but I’m not pleased with the overall shape, or the mood of Alecto.

Flip the page over, quickly trace the sword and that one figure I liked. Oh yeah that new Alecto works, too. I wasn’t feeling the rest, though. Needed to fool around some more.

And after a lot of furious scribbling, I think I’ve got it. I really like the impulsive idea of showing Alecto reflected in Edge (the sword) instead of having her beside it; this sets up one of the story’s themes, that she’s just another damn tool to the Sidhe, right there as the first thing you see. We’ve got New Orleans, we’ve got most of the other major characters, we’ve got a swirl of miscellaneous fairies to say “hey this is a fantasy”.

Now all I have to do is put this sketch (along with some of my character design roughs) into Illustrator and start painting. But really what I should be doing right now is finishing the next page of Rita…

just this yellow snake I guess

Peggy
January 30, 2015

You probably want to click through to the full-sized piece. Kinda NSFW.

Continue reading →

Ozymandias

Peggy
January 27, 2015

I just got Sanjay Patel’s lovely adaptation of the Ramayana. Lengthy narrative in a super-designey flat color mode? That’s my happy place. Right there.

Looking at it and thinking about adaptations, plus thinking about the Monument Valley trip I’m planning, plus having just decided I want to memorize ‘Ozymandias’, combined into “I will do a test of my templates for Drowning City to do an adaptation of Ozymandias, starring George Herriman as the nameless traveller who tells Shelley about this evocative remnant.”

I need to think a bit more about what exactly is going on in the passage about how well the head’s “sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, /The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;” before I commit to the panels I sketched around it. Whose hand and heart, exactly? Ozymandias’? Someone else? I threw Kalinda into those panels as some kind of fabulous monster Ozymandias’ forgotten deeds involved him slaying, it might be fun to have her in some sort of weird relationship with Ozymandias in the rest of them. (Also that is intended to be a humanish version of her in the last panel, telling Shelly to stop bogarting the opium. I definitely feel this could wind through the whole story…)

Terrible Halloween Ideas

Peggy
October 24, 2014

I was planning on just sewing a bunch of LEDs into my black coat and going as a Blinky Witch, but I think I just came up with a much more beautifully stupid idea. All I need is a few layers of red lingerie, black goggles or wraparound mirrorshades, an emblem sewn to the uppermost layer, a black beanie, and a black balloon full of helium!

Bonus points: persuade someone to dress up as John DiFool, and make a Deepo by attaching some stuff to a white balloon.

Nobody will get this. Except for that one person who is quite possibly a NEW BEST FRIEND.

I’m really tempted to do this. And still keep on sewing LEDs into my coat, of course, because, hey, who doesn’t want to high-tech multicolor witch coat?

texture experiment

Peggy
October 9, 2014

I was sitting around answering questions in the Illustrator subreddit when I found a link to a neat tutorial on faking toothbrush splatters in Illustrator.

So I tried it out.

I added a wrinkle to it that the tutorial didn’t bother with; instead of having a lot of duplicated shapes with grained-up gradients over flat fills, I just added a new fill to my shapes with the Appearance palette, then gave them various linear and radial fills that I added the grain filter to and set to multiply mode. Less shapes are better, in my mind, because it’s a ton easier to go in and tweak things for just the right curve.

(You could also just draw the grainy gradients inside the shapes, which upon reflection would probably be a bit faster, but I dunno, I just like the technical sweetness of the Appearance palette sometimes.)

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out for a 15-minute doodle. I may have to do a more involved piece using this effect sometime in the future.

Here’s the AI source if you want to poke around.

(If you’ve read Rita, please do not try to read any significance into my color choices – this is just me picking random colors that felt fun together.)

the dream of the Realm of the King

Peggy
August 30, 2014

This morning, I dreamed I was reading a book. It was full of gorgeous full-bleed illustrations of techno-mesoamerican-hindu architecture floating in the sky. Everything was rendered in a palette of deep, saturated brown, an intense turquoise, and a golden yellow. It was all supposedly drawn by Jack Kirby, but didn’t have any of his signature handling of black – it was all flat color without lines. Each illustration had a small bit of text laid over it Like a quarter of the page, I think.

Then I was interrupted by a small dark-skinned child, who asked me what I was reading. I started to explain it, then decided to show it to him, but as I flipped through the book all I got were pages full of text. They were in the same colors, with the page in the blue, and the text in the brown, with occasional use of the yellow in bold for emphasis.

It very much felt like a glimpse into Kirby’s version of Vallhalla, to be honest.

Edit. I decided to spend some time drawing that. I kinda got lost in filling in the text instead of drawing the city; I may come back and add more to the city. The composition is straight out of my dream; the text is me basically googling a bunch of Aztec randomness and asking myself “What would Kirby do with these elements?”.

I am not going to start writing this as an illustrated story. I hope.

I will however note that I figure “Ixtab” totally dresses like a superhero. And is ultimately possessed of some sort of reality-bending power that makes the whole story vanish up its own asshole. Seems about right for something I half-remember from a dream.

vampire doodlin’

Peggy
July 8, 2014

I’ve been thinking about that vampire lady who lies a lot, and thinking about the look for her world. Basically it’d be doing the same trick Frank Miller does in the Sin City books – stark B&W noir, plus a key color for one character – except each vampire would have a key color of their own. I’d put more effort into it than this but maybe not necessarily too much more.

It’s got something like three years to simmer, I can afford to dabble for a while.

I AM THE LAW

Peggy
June 1, 2014

Judge Dredd. Inspired by this article on Dredd’s uniform.

The Twelve Peabodies

Peggy
March 19, 2014

I’ve been toying with this idea for months, ever since I heard there was a Sherman and Mr. Peabody movie coming out. Seeing the trailer and liking it made me decide to actually play with it.

Four and Five were the easiest, because those were My Doctors. But I laughed my ass off at what ended up happening for Three and Seven.

Also I guess this is my proposal for a Mr. Peabody TV series if I change the names of his various Boys and Girls. Every episode is of a different Peabody, they constantly jump back and forth because there’s no continuity allowed in Jay Ward’s world outside of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I’m kind of tempted to finish this – much tighter drawings, and my own version of the War Peabody. And probably some radically different presentation because the Internet is really a lot more hospitable to vertical scrolls than horizontals. Click through, and click again to see it full-size if your browser squashes it to fit. Any suggestions as to which companions I should fill in the blanks with are welcome; I tried to pick ones that felt like they would make interesting, and funny-looking, combinations as the sole Boy or Girl of that Peabody.

(also Three totally needs to be a riff on Searle’s drawings of Molesworth. Nine and later may end up with Gritty Teen Cartoon Reboot stylings…)

dabbling in soft focus

Peggy
March 16, 2014

About one hour of fucking around. Lots of blurred shapes at low opacity.

And a bit of experimentation with d-mesh. Hexagonal pattern fill + big square + 4×4 mesh. Distort until it mostly fits on the shape of the head, then constrain it to only overlap the head with a clipping mask. Then be too lazy to finish off the edges of the hair to make it clear that it’s a solid shape, with corners and thickness.

I might work on this some more, might not. Really I wanted to do something a bit more painterly but I ended up deciding that a modelled drawing of Rita just has to be all airbrushy; she’s a sleek, smooth thing.

(Also I totally suck for not making sure the shapes actually worked as a drawing before getting into the modelling. It was super easy to get lost in details and end up with some seriously weird proportions; luckily Illustrator made it easy to pull things back into shape. If I want to try this again I should really get the full figure all set up before getting into this kind of stuff. Which is, um… basic drawing logic? Hey, like I said. Fucking around.)