Skip to main content

Inks

Miette and Cement from Puppets by Schmitt and Edwards.
The monster crosses the Mittman Street Bridge into Central City.

I'm combining my company logo with one of the main characters from this book project due out in December of 2012. Until them I'm printing this inked design as black-and-white stickers for upcoming comic cons including ASH and Summit City. Let me know what you think of it.

Inks for this project are more fun than I had anticipated. I'm trying to get more of the central pieces of art finalized. A few of these drawings are cracking me up with the "extreme" facial expressions in some of the individual panels.

Currently, I'm digitally inking over 120+ pencils. I'm finding a few tight little compositions like these, that can be seen in larger view at Picasa for the book. Yep, I did say 120+ panels. That's about 17 pages.

Ratso!
Ratso is kinda psyched about some stuff. Rat stuff.

ART TECHNIQUE:
These pages start as seriously eff'ed up drawings - real messy graphite. Then, the original drawings get scanned in and dumbed down to 150 dpi reference art. This "pencil" layer lives w/in an AI document as a PSD or JPEG.

Adobe Illustrator very easily accepts the scanned "pencil" layer when it's imported as a PSD. Be sure to import the PSD with the "individual objects" setting checked! After the AI line work is completed, as an "art" layer, the image is exported from AI to PS for color and lettering.

After the color and lettering passes are finalized in PS my pages are brought into an InDesign document then I assemble it as a book. For you hardcore book designers: please note the "Import Options" check box when placing art in InDesign. You'll find some very robust tools in this option!

Puppets by Gargantuan MediaRoaches by Gargantuan Media
Copy code to add Puppets to your site:Copy code to add Roaches to your site:

Popular posts from this blog

Puppets Comic Series

The cover for the first edition of Puppets by Schmitt and Edwards. Puppets is a graphic novel that revolves around a strange 9-year-old girl named Miette and the vengeance she seeks in the form of a giant concrete monster named Cement. As for production, the final art style itself is getting sorted out, pages inked and six chapters of story are completed. The plan is to animate this book project after the book is released. I'm currently planning the audio elements for the animation as I complete art for the book. This is going more smoothly thanks to the writer on book, Mr. Derek Edwards, of White Rabbit Books . Derek has re-written the book into 6 chapters that will have readers following Miette and her fractured childhood. Cement is surprised by another monster, the massive Blob. The Blob busily dissolves people and buildings then is confronted by the ARC equipped military forces. It/they are smashed up into smaller parts by Cement. The scene features Cement, Miette and AR
Read more

Blob v. Downtown

The Blob, merrily eating it's way through Midtown Central City. Cement is surprised by another monster, the massive Blob. The Blob busily dissolves people and buildings then is confronted by the ARC equipped military forces. It/they are smashed up into smaller parts by Cement. The scene features Cement, Miette and ARC troopers and the Blob. There's two principles (Miette, Cement) plus 1 Kaiju (Blob) plus misc. ARC soldiers (7-12 of them firing ARC's) and tanks (3-4) to animate here. That's a total of like 14-19 plates spinning around at once, minus the flames and smoke! In the script, the Blob bellows when hit by small arms fire or by Cement - like a heavy bass meant to rock small film fest theaters. Each time one of the blobs are hit they sound off as a herd with the bass's pitch and volume relative to the size of each blob. The "central" and largest "main" blob would always be the deepest sounding bass with the smaller blobs sounding dif
Read more

Cement and Miette

Early production art from Puppets with Cement and Miette. Early production art for Puppets blocking out the basics of form, grayscale tone and scale. Cement is 6 stories/65 feet tall and Miette is barely 4 feet tall so getting them into the same shot/frame was one of the first challenges. Reviewing Godzilla, King Kong and Gamera movies (which I somehow have all of which on VHS and VCD) saved me a great deal of time. Looking at the composition of the screaming crowds or Faye Wray and Naomi Watts has helped me structure my shots and lay out. On the Mittman Street Bridge Cement faces off against Ratso and his horde. Looking at my own unlikely combination of very large and very small characters make me feel like there is a unique "middle ground" created by this combination as if the two would be radically different w/out each other's company. Miette alone would be an vague, indie Ghost World rip-off. Cement alone would be a Concrete/Godzilla clone. Together they ar
Read more