Hey, there sports fans, Al here with the latest:
So after the last two weeks as seen in my last blog, I have been working hard on getting the pages and layouts set up for the next phase of Richard Parker. This namely entails refining the illustration aspect of the work. Most of the “blown up” drawing are scaled up thumbnails (to keep the “flavor” of the original idea) to a size that that will be transferred to the scratchboard. But now comes a question.
With the 24 pieces that need to be transferred to the scratchboard, do I refine all of the illustrations OR DO I work on one piece at a time?
I had to keep this in mind because like with anything else you can get bored with the same old shit day in and day out with you are doing the same routine over and over again. And when you lose that attention to detail you make mistakes.
And in artwork, you don’t need that because it can cost you lots of money down the road.
I know. I have several because I was pushing myself to get things done quickly to meet a deadline for a show that I was going to be at.
Not anymore. There are some new programs I have to teach myself to make the books look professional. Namely Adobe Illustrator.
But so as I can see I haven’t received any callbacks from being laid off so I’ll take advantage of my time.
But during this time I am going to have to keep working on the physical artwork first.
So back to my original question.
I think knowing myself after 50+ years of age I can say that working on one piece at a time will be the way to go on this project.
But I will say that time occasionally does throw curves at us all and necessity makes other things slide into place. In my case travel and exercise do this me semi of the time. So work on Corpse Cop #4 “Death Walks the Stars” (the bookend of that series) will be a big scratchboard project comic style. But as I said – curves. So only a small handful amount of thumbnails are done while I am taking a small break from the bike ride so I don’t become the super flabby artist I know I can be.
AND coloring has been done on Last Monster on EARTH! Now digital coloring and I have been at odds with each other for several years but in the last couple of months of doing digital inking and purchasing new inking brushes for photoshop, I have been working it fill in the gaps of the original artwork. This has helped figure out coloring.
The last major digital coloring job that I did was issue 4 of Johnny Vega, Man of the Future. That was an intensive and exhaustive run for me ten years ago!
Good Lord, where my time has gone.