June 23rd, 2010
If you’re reading this in your office, envy me! Because I’m in the most beautiful place in Italy, in Sardinia! If you’re on vacation yourself, shame on you, what are you doing in front of the computer!
Anyway… I’ll be back in a couple of weeks!
And now… let’s jump back into the water…
June 18th, 2010
Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.
June 17th, 2010
Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.
June 14th, 2010
I had another terrible week. A week where I had no time ad all the wonderfully superfluous things like, among others, updating my blog. Maybe I have to accept the things as they are and renounce one and for all to the idea of posting here regularly… but whatever…
It’s no news that I don’t read a lot of comics anymore. I prefer to inspire myself with other media, like for example novels. I’ve stumbled over a couple of really interesting readings lalely, which I’d like to talk about here.
The first one is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that take the original novel by Jane Austen and turns it into something you’d actually want to read (as the book itself states). Apart from the illustrations, which are just plain lousy (why do they pay people like that to illustrate a book, while talented people have a hard time getting commissions?) and the fact that the book is no easy reading, it’s a great experiment and great fun to read most of the time. The author keeps the original plot and linguistic style, adddins a bit of zombies, gore and martial arts here and there. While this novel is not perfect (sometimes it can be tiresome to read, due to the old fashioned language, and the there’s some problems with the storyline here and there) I highly recomend it!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_and_Zombies
Another book I’d like to talk about it In Cuniculum by Lapin. Unfortunately this one’s only available in English, but since It contains several illustratins by me, (attention: subliminal advertising) I though I’d talk about it anyway. Lapin has a highly imaginative and surreal way of writing, the short stories that make up In Cuniculum are sometimes shocking, sometimes fascinating. One way or the other, Lapin knows how to surprise you and the book is a great read I hope he’ll get it translated in the future!
June 6th, 2010
More about this sooner or later (still working on it)…
June 5th, 2010
Some drawings I’ve made last saturday, during the Art May Sound Festival in Bolzano. Funny how my jazz players start to look more and more like zombies…
Talking of which, here’s some more picture of the live painting act: diariodeformato.blogspot.com
June 4th, 2010
I don’t know how many times, in my short carreer as a comic artist, I have heard the question: “are you making these yourself, or are you using the computer?”, where using a computer means that the computer does all the work, and I just stand there and watch. I guess the cause of this assumption is to be traced back to the movies of the fifties, where somebody enters random data into a giant metal wardrobe with many buttons, glowing lamps and magnetic tape spools (also called the computer) which, after an incredibly short time returns the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything.
In real life things are bit more complicated.
In my case it all starts with me preparing the pencils for the inking (as we have seen in the previous installment), and continues with the scanning and pre-print process.
Usually I scan the drawings at 1200 dpi, grayscale. The cyan tint of the pencils turns into a pale grey, which is easily eliminated. The end product will be a page with a resolution of 600dpi, the ink drawing should be clear and clean. Scanning it at such a high resolution I can clean it up and then reduce it to 600dpi without causing unwanted artifacts.
Usually after scanning the page I end up with something like this:
As you can see (or not see, depending of your monitor) the inks are greyish and dirty, and you can see the texture of the paper and the pencils underneath. The next step is to use the “levels” function of the image editing software to get rid of all that unwanted stuff, by “cutting” away most of the luminance spectrum.
I use some pretty agressice settings here to reduce everything to just black and white. I don’t care if the lines look jagged at this stage, that’s why I’m working at 1200dpi!
The end result is some clean and sharp inks. The next step is to reduce them to 600dpi, which will soften the edges a bit, but not make them blurred.
Once I have the page at the desired format and resolution, I add some shadows. I draw these directly on the computer using a tablet.
For Giètz! we didn’t print using black ink. Instead we used a brown Pantone ink. The final effect is that the inks are dark brown and the shadows a lighter tint of the same colour.
This was the last episode of this tutorial series. But don’t worry, I have a lot more to tell you about this project!
June 2nd, 2010
He no longer saw them. It was as if they had vanished from the world, and not just his own. The very idea was absurd, after all it was his problem, and the solution offered by the Union, he recalled, had not been quite so final. He supposed that they had altered his vision, removed them from it, transforming them maybe, rendering them unrecognisable. But it wasn’t long before he stopped wondering about them altogether, having become too busy collecting the rib bones he found everywhere on the streets, too preoccupied by his bizarre desire for the meat upon them.