LIFE/interior: Miss you (8) 13 Aug 2011
Continued from previous.
Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in two. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers...
(more...)LIFE/interior: Miss you (8) 12 Aug 2011
A double page today. Story continues and we are actually getting to the end. Think of this note as when you take a quick look at the watch in the cinema and you realize there's only about 10 minutes left. :)
Technicalities: For the last months I tried to keep myself under 2048 pixels of height. Not for really a good reason, just because bigger seemed to mess with quite a few things like the Facebook poster and some thumbnail generators. But I really feel some bits of the story need to be together and I could have published to pages simultaneously but decided for a big one. Also, this is a bit of a return to past techniques, but with the addition of some graphite shading. All drawings are scanned here, and only minor shading added.
Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in two. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers...
(more...)Well it's been a few weeks without updates. I actually have a few pages almost finished, this time I just wanted to try to make sure they are a bit more coherent. Not sure if it will work, of course...
I'm having a bit of a conundrum here, well I would if I knew what the word conundrum actually means. Thing is, I've tried color with some very nice results but most of the time it doesn't feel right. I feel I really need to set on a small palette, maybe grays or shades of blue or something. For the time being I decided I'm going a bit back and using shades applied in Inkscape and pencil shading.
I'll continue practicing with watercolors to see where I can apply them safely.
Take a look at this:
Here, I had a lot of fun drawing it with the graphite pencil. Then I applied some ink as usual. After that I would normally just remove all pencil, either erasing or on the computer, but I figured I could try to take advantage of it and keep some shades of gray which give it a very nice look. Considering it's supposed to be part of a kind-of-gloomy scene, it feels right.
Above you can see the original pencil&ink work, quite draft. I scanned it and then removed pencil via Levels (2nd image), then added a kind of sepia background and some shading for the final image. It still needs a bit more work, a bit more shading but you get the idea.
Finally, above you can see yet another twist on the style. It's a pencil image, which as I've mentioned I enjoy drawing, to which I added a bit of ink (just a bit), and then scanned. On top of it I layered the basic sepia/brown colors you can see. It's simple and very fast, which is a bonus to lazy people like me.
Anyway, I'm going to update the last comic page I posted in LIFE/interior because I didn't like the color. I'll just remove some color. It might show up in your Feed reader, sorry about that. The next page is coming shortly after that.
Oh, the meaningful conclusion is this: I want to do what I enjoy the most, and that seems to be more about pencil and real paper than computers and watercolor, so far. Both using the computer and watercolor have a big drawback: they need a 'setup', kind of a chair space, sitting in a specific place, etc., while drawing panels with a pencil can be done almost anywhere.
(more...)Paul the innovator (7): The first version 23 Jul 2011
Of course, this is in no way related to my day job experiences, it's just speculation on how life must be for the poor souls that have to work in an environment where things like this could happen.
Honest.
(more...)LIFE/interior: Miss you (7) 09 Jul 2011
New comic, finally. Summer is taking a toll, as you can see... but it goes on. Update: created a new page removing most of the color.
Technicalities: Mostly scanned, except for the two portraits I made just using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape. Colored using watercolor pencils, different types of paper, but none of them actually watercolor paper.
(more...)LIFE/interior: Miss you (6) 17 Jun 2011
And another page... you can't complain about me being late with this page because it's got kittens, come on, kittens!
Technicalities: I did strange things with this one. First panel is mostly just pen-brush going crazy, with some added watercolor just for the sake of it. Last one is mostly watercolor but I added some shade using pen in still damp paper, which gives an interesting effect.
(more...)LIFE/interior: Miss you (5) 02 Jun 2011
A colorful one, because... why not? :)
I enjoy painting with watercolors. It takes me back to childhood memories. I think that it somehow looks better, notwithstanding the fact that I'm not particularly good at picking colors.
And yes, we are getting closer to an ending. Oh!
Technicalities: This time all the drawings were drawn by hand, with the exception of that little Ana at the bottom, which is actually copy&pasted and slightly retouched from another page. The scanned images had almost no modification, but an Auto levels adjustment in GIMP is a must. Some I adjusted manually, but basically if I don't do the levels everything looks faded. In particular, the ink seems to not like being watered. Also, the final size of the image was roughly 2 MB which is quite a lot, so I had to compress it a bit and make a jpg.
(more...)I got a bit distracted 30 May 2011
I have an outline for the next page but somehow got distracted drawing with this graphite pencil. It's a lot of fun. Pencil doesn't really translate very well to the screen, so I did the trick with the auto levels of Mac OS X's preview and it looks better.
The pen is a Cretacolor Monolith, which is particularly interesting because it's essentially all graphite, no wood, but still feels like a normal pencil.
I've been doing some other sketches but maybe it's a bit too early to upload them, I'm thinking of a new character for the 3-panel strips (or similar) format.
(more...)LIFE/interior: Miss you (4) 21 May 2011
I know you want violence but there's still a little more talk to come, and kittens.
Technicalities: There's three panels where I played again with the watercolours, guess which ones they are :). Maybe I should also mention that these past pages I have done them without an external monitor, meaning trusting the crappy screen of my old macbook for the colors. I need to check how these look in a nicer screen.
(more...)LIFE/interior: Miss you (3) 14 May 2011
Well I think I skipped a week, bad Oscar, bad. I hope my huge audience will tolerate this, acknowledging busy life can sometimes mess with release plans.
Technicalities: there's a few panels in which I tried coloring a bit by hand, with watercolours. I had to enhance the color levels a bit because after scanning they tend to look quite dime.
(more...)