I’ve worked on various comics in my spare time which I’m in the process of converting to webcomics. One of the most enduring figures I’ve created is a hitman who goes by the name of ‘Diablo’, and is the star of a five part series. The artwork underwent serious style changes before the final run. The linework was done in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, and all inking an colour work was done in Adobe Photoshop.

This was the first iteration. I found everything to be too flat and lacked dynamic movement. This panel actually turned out pretty dramatic, though. I liked the style and how simple the characters were, but the arrangement was all wrong. For every nice frame there were too many ‘blah’ frames.

This was the second run – I was unsure of the style and the way the art was presented in the panels.
But I forged ahead and did a few pages in this format.

I used some dramatic lighting and blur/glow/film grain effects to create mood in this trial. The process wasn’t really effective for realistic time frames I had set for production, so it will be shelved for something else until I can figure out how to pull it off quickly and easily. Too bad – this turned out really nice.

More of the same technique.

I decided that I would bridge the gap between the moody grey version and the simple linework of the initial version and I was more than happy with the result. I refined the artwork, changed the angle and dynamic of the pages and established a better foundation for the comic. One more final revision after this and the art test was complete. I was ready to move on and start developing the comic based on a style I was happy to call my own.

Here’s some of the sketchbook sketches I had lying around for development purposes.

I drew a lot of inspiration from the illustration used in Grand Theft Auto from Stephen Bliss. His extensive portfolio can be found at his site – he’s done a ton of work for Rockstar Games and I absolutely love his style which borders on realism/graphic representation and his use of colour to create mood. Check his work out at www.stephenbliss.com.

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Tags: Sketchbook

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Sketchbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.