Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Work In Progress: FADE Illustration


Just a quick illustration as I continue work on the Fade novel. I like to sketch out some of the characters and images rolling around in my head as I write. It's a good way for me to transition from the part of my brain that handles the day job drawing comics into the part that handles the writing.

This one is of Evan Fade, the 16-year old protagonist of the book. Since I've already established what he looks like as an adult (in the short stories I did for the NEGATIVE BURN anthology), I wanted to figure out how he looks at this stage of his life.

And for anyone interested in my technique, here's a look at the various stages in the process of putting this illustration together. I pencil everything, ink all of the lines with a pen, and then fill in the large areas of black with the computer before dropping a flat color (in this case, a weak yellow) in a few spots.


2 comments:

John Hornor said...

I doubt you need anyone telling you "great work," but I'll do it anyway. Great work.

I'm curious, on your pencil rough, do you have an earlier pencil sketch? I mean, this seems perfectly positioned for positive and negative space. Did you just freehand it with the design in mind or did you have some more preliminary sketches which you refined?

Do you work at a lightboard?

matthew dow smith said...

Thanks, John. Believe me, I don't mind hearing 'great work' whenever humanly possible.

On a piece like this, I don't usually do a pencil sketch. I just go right in with a general idea in my head and start laying in some shapes until they come together on the page.

And I've used light boards before, but not any more. There was a period where I did tight little thumbnails and then blew them up on a copier before tracing them onto the full sized final page.

But really, it was an extra step that didn't add a lot to the final look of a piece.