EricZ

Here’s a panel from my 7 page short story for the upcoming Cloudscape anthology.

X-Men FCBD

X-Men FCBD

X-Men FCBD

X-Men FCBD

These are some Marvel samples I did back in April from Mike Carey’s “Free Comic Book Day X-Men” script, which showcases the fairly new character, Pixie. I’m fairly proud of them overall, but the N’Garai demons need a little work. While working on these pages, I learned a lot about the balance between visually appealing work and perfect storytelling. I find that this is an issue with a lot of sequential artists. There are always going to be situations where you can draw a scene in the most beautiful way that comes to mind at the cost of clear storytelling. On the flip side, there are many artists out there who always find a way to make the storytelling as clear as possible, but the page just has nothing interesting to look at. If I were to assess my work overall, I think I suffer from the latter problem. A good artist can always find a balance between the two.

Generally, I think these pages feel a little naked without any sort of inking or colour, but I think they turned out fairly well.

Apocalyptic Vancouver

Here’s a full page done with the Cintiq. Certain elements of the composition didn’t come out exactly as I’d hoped (like the movement of the robot at the end), but I’m fairly proud of the colouring, which is something that’s still new to me.

I loved working on this page with the Cintiq because I was able to easily alter the page after most of the pencil work was done. For instance, the last panel originally had a straight horizon line parallell to the panel borders, but I found it was more effective in conveying the movement of the robot by rotating it quite a bit to the left. The diagonal aspect of the horizon allows the eye to read the character as moving faster because the eye is already traveling in a similar path as it moves from panel 6 to 7. I was also able to flip a panel I originally penciled out in full and add a new panel after most of the page work was already done. Overall, creating the page digitally is much more beneficial because it allows me to more effectively improve upon work already half completed.

Apocalyptic Vancouver

Initially my biggest worry with switching over from drawing on paper to drawing digitally on a Cintiq was how I would be able to do backgrounds without the use of a ruler. Using a ruler directly on the cintiq would be too risky considering how easy it is to scratch the screen and the line tool in photoshop is not an option for me. After a little research, I found that the best option was using Manga Studio because of it’s ruler tool. The tool is amazing and I’m surprised that photoshop hasn’t stolen it yet. It took me a while to get used to it, but I ended up making the ruler grab tool one of my side buttons on the Cintiq, directly under the ink brush button, which made things a lot easier. For drawing out backgrounds, I sketch out how I want it to look, create a perspective plane using the perspecting tool and align it up with my sketch as best as possible, reduce it’s opacity so that it’s just a reference for me, then I create a ruler and put one end point on a vanishing point and then continually move the other end around to where ever I need to use it in the final inking process.

This image is my first shot at drawing a regular comic panel and it looks no different from my regular ‘drawn on paper’ look. All in all, I’m very happy with the Cintiq. I just need to develop a solid workflow and I’ll likely get faster at drawing a full page.

Cintiq 21UX

     I recently plunked down a lot of money on the purchase of a Cintiq 21UX. So basically I’m taking the plunge into the world of completely digital art. We’re heading towards a paper-less world anyway, so what’s the saying? “Evolve or die”? My goal here is to save as much time on drawing as possible without losing any quality. My hope is that it’ll save me several hours a page.

To do pencils and inks on a full comic page on paper usually takes me about 12-13 hours all said. I’m hoping to cut that down to 8-10 hours a page with the Cintiq. My theory is that I can be a lot looser with the ‘digital pencils’ and I can go straight to ‘digital inking’. The undo button is your best friend in this digital world. I’m kind of sad that there’ll no longer be any physical version of the original art, though. Also, comic artists tend to derive a lot of extra income from the selling of their original art and this is probably going to become rarer as the years go by. I understand that artists like Mike Norton and Skottie Young use the Cintiq to do the ‘pencil’ work, print that out in blue on 11×17 paper and ink over it. This way, the physical original art exists and they get to save time on the penciling. I’m thinking that my method is going to be strictly digital from start to finish, though.

      I’m currenly working on my first fully digital comic page using this new toy of mine, so I’m going to post the results soon.

GW Noir

For the past couple of years, I’ve moved over to a strictly ‘line-art’ style for sequential page renders. My very early sequential work had a distinct noir, heavily shadowed final rendering. (as evident by my pages for “The Killers: Wars End”) But over time, I grew concerned over the necessity to complete a page a day and found that taking away all that time calculating shadows would allow me to be able to make such a deadline. Also, with the emergence of artists like Mike Choi and Sara Pichelli in mainstream comics, I see a growing trend towards more of a collaboration with colourists. This is the future of mainstream comics. I predict that over-rendered images are going to be seen as very dated to this current era of comics. While we’ll always have ‘noir’ styled comics out there, I believe that they’ll be pretty rare.

Nevertheless, it’s been years since I’ve drawn in a ‘noir’ style, so I decided to give it a try the other day. I think I’m a little shaky with it, but I’m happy with the final result. The benefit here is that it doesn’t need to be coloured to fully appreciate it. I find my ‘line art’ sequentials look kind of naked without the colour.

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I’m currently competing in the July Zuda competition with a comic I illustrated and co-wrote called “Metropolitan Siege.” Please vote for me at the site so I can continue the story!

Future Project Cover #2

This is the cover for issue #2 of an upcoming project of mine.

Future Project

This is a teaser image I did for a project that I’m working on with Tim Simmons of “Comic Book Script Archives” and “Spy6Teen” fame. I can’t really talk about much beyond that.