papernoise blackbook

The third part of the tutorial will have to wait a bit more, in the meantime, here comes the official book trailer for Giètz!

Unfortunately today is another one of those days where I can’t post anything. I hope I can catch up tomorrow.

Im my last post I have been talking about pencils, now I’ll procede with the second stage: inking.

Since a couple of years I’ve been using, with great satisfaction, a Pentel Pocket Brush, which is like a fountain-pen (with cartridge!), but with a nylong brush tip instead. The ink it uses isn’t perfect, in fact it’s not pigment based, so you can have some hue shifts in time and it’s not water-proof. On the other hand these issues are largely balanced by the great ease of use! It’s like using a tip felt pen but with the added possibilities (in terms of modulation) of a real brush.

Before I was using the good old Windsor&Newton brush, but I had a lot of problems. Apart from forcing me to a much slower workflow, the brushes wouldn’t last more than a week, then I had to replace them.

My approach to inking is quite simple, depending on the light situation it ranges from near-ligne-claire to chiaroscuro with lots of black. I always keep in ming that I will add a halftone later, so I don’t define everything at this stage. Sometimes I test the light setting on a separate sheet (see: from the storyboard to the final page). I use the brushstrokes in many different ways, as little, thin lines to add texture and detail, in their thicker form to create gradient effects. Thick strokes are really great to draw hair, trees and other plants as well.

Depending on the type of paper, the Pentel can prove to be quite tricky. Sometimes the tip can get too loaded and start to spill a bit, or the strokes become too thick. This happens a lot while drawing details, when you need precision the most! For this reason it’s better to use a paper that absorbs a lot, otherwise you’ll have to keep on “discharging” the brush on a towel.

So here we are at the end of this second installment, if everything goes according to plan, I should be able to post the last part, halftone and finalization, next week on friday!

Détective Noir by Ryan Licata

From his ninth storey window the city lights, on and off, created a mosaic against the night. He swigged neat whiskey from a tumbler, staring in at all those well-lit apartments. In rooms and kitchens, against curtains drawn, he could see the cut-out silhouettes of people having their parties. Women, their necks thrown back, mouths agape, laughing their heads off; and men, hanging up their dinner jackets, loosening their neckties, smoking short-cropped cigars. He smoked one himself, raised his drink. Let them have their fun with the lights on, for later, in the dark, he knew it would be murder.

Notes

This is the first Detective Noir story by Ryan Licata, the first one he wrote, (I had published the second one, Detective Noir et la Chatte, already some time ago here). It was his idea that the detective should looks somehow like me. I will do the whole bunch in the next weeks, they make up a nice little series inside his hundred word stories.

I’m back! Workload has not diminished in the last days, but I thought “who cares?” so tomorrow there will be a new hundred word stories post, and on friday some Gietz goodness as well! In the meantime, remember me talking about 2010 being a year of music for me? About Rumpelfilter, my musical project? Well I’m kind of getting more and more into chiptunes, I would never have thought I’d like something like that… but then I discovered several bands that really convinced me that chiptunes can be great music, and now it’s becoming a drug…

To be earnest I still have a little problem with the pure chiptune sound, especially when it comes from a Gameboy. I prefer it when people do something more with the chip sound than just record it as it is, or if they add some acoustic instruments or voice.

Since the principle of being an addict requires to drag other people into it as well, here’s a couple of free-to-downlad albums you should really check out (preview track included!):

Ninja 9000 – Bit Collapse EP

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It’s his fault if I’m a chiptune addict now, this guy makes everything with a software plugin called chipsounds, so it’s not “the real thing” but he is just so good. Chipsounds is a great plugin btw, does a great jop in emulating all of the great 8bit sound chips, from the SID to the Gameboy, I think I’ll be getting my own copy in the near future.

Ninja900 is actually a side project by Gisle Martens Meyer of Ugress fame. If you know his other projects you should recognize him immediately, he’s got a very distinctive style. With Ninja900 he managed to create some really polished and well produced tracks while keeping the roughness and simplicity of chipmusic sound.

Download the album here

Pornophonique – 8-bit lagerfeuer

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As they describe it: “a guitar, a Gameboy, a C64, two guys (…)”. The idea is to mix campfire athmosphere with chitune sounds, and it works quite well imho! Pornophonique must have had a lot of fun while making this album,at least that’s the feeling I get while listening to these tracks!

Download the album here

The J.Arthur Keenes Band – Pamplemousse

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This is one of the more recent releases. One of the best for this first part of 2010! Sometimes the chiptune sounds and melodies in Pamplemousse can sound quite rough and simplistic, but that’s only the first impression (usually at the beginning of a track), once the song gets going, and the voice starts, it creates a really nice contrast between the simple aliased waves of the Gameboy and the smoth “analogue” sounds of the guitar and the voice.

Download the album here

These are just 3 among many, there’s a lot more out there… check out 8bitcollective.com or chipmusic.org if you want to discover more stuff… or just come back here in a week, I will post some more links to albums I like!

Sorry, still none of my regular posts. But in the meantime here’s a small preview of a comic I’ve been working on lately. It’s about the fathers of goth rock Bauhaus and it will be published in the upcoming anthology Guida illustrata al frastuono più atroce #2 by the Italian punk comic group Lamette. I really like the vintage film touch I managed to give to this panels. Basically it’s the “Dog Show technique” adapted to b/w. The text is a variation on the Bauhaus hit Bela Lugosi is Dead. That’s why it all looks like some old horror movie.

As you will have noticed I haven’t been updating the blog this week. Though Gietz! is now finished, I still have a lot of stuff to do that I have kept rescheduling because of the aformentioned…

I really need a couple of weeks to get my life back into balance, then I will start to post as usual. Please don’t forget me in the meantime.