Thursday, July 15, 2010

My art process!

As you may know, Starkweather: Immortal, a hardcover graphic novel from Archaia which I did the art for, is out now!! (You can order it so many places on the web, but you may want to do it on Amazon.com - CLICK HERE TO ORDER!).

As part of the bonus features, we were going to include a 4-page "how-to" feature, but unfortunately it was cut due to space. So now I'm presenting it here, because I thought it came out pretty well and some of you might enjoy seeing the process I go through to create my comics. And if you like it, or have any questions at all, leave a comment.



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7 comments:

Lisa said...

Very cool, cousin! I'm looking forward to getting my copy :-)

Patrick McEvoy said...

Hey Lisa!!! Hope you like it when you finally see it. :D Thanks for stopping by. <3

Shane Smith said...

Great stuff!

How long does a full page usually take you from start to finish? Also I'd like to hear more about your painter cloning technique. I've heard you mention it on Ninja Mountain and was intrigued. Is the fire painted from scratch or do you use texture overlays etc? It's very convincing.

Patrick McEvoy said...

Thanks Shane!

Usually a page takes about an hour or two to lay out, and a half a day for drawing, then pretty much a full day to render. Of course if there's any special reference, photos, etc. then that will add to the time. In hours, I'd say probably about 14-16 hours total would be average. :)

Patrick McEvoy said...

On the cloning, it's really straightforward. I have "quick clone" set up to just make a clone without deleting the original, then simply use any brush I like on the clone, by setting the brush to the cloning option (which is a button to the bottom left of the Painter color wheel).

The only trick is to save out of Photoshop as a .PSD in RGB (Never use CMYK with Painter or bad things will happen). Then when bringing your cloned picture back into Photoshop, use the "discard color profile" option.

On the fire, this one was painted from scratch with reference, though sometimes I'll just paste in a piece of reference fire and paint over that. :) Best thing with fire is to put the individual "licks" of fire in a separate layer and use the smudge tool to move them around into a smooth and dancing shape, then use the Burn tool to add strands of lighter value for interest. It's actually a pretty quick process.

Shane Smith said...

Very cool, I'll have to find an excuse to try out your fire technique. Do your printers handle the conversion to CMYK then? I always find it a pain getting a decent reproduction from Painter.

Patrick McEvoy said...

Sometimes I can send in as RGB if the client likes to do the conversion themselves, but usually I'll just work in RGB and convert to CMYK at the very end. I just try to stay away from out-of-gamut colors as I go and it's usually OK. :)