I’ve spent 3 years working on a graphic novel about jazz music, and this made me discover and appreciate many musicians I didn’t know (or didn’t know well) before. Still I can’t say that I’m a Jazz addict, even while drawing Gietz!, most of the time I would listen to completely different music, like The Cure or some chiptunes. At one point I felt the need to find some flavour of contemporary Jazz that was somehow more in line with my taste. I dicovered a whole new world!
There’s this current in Jazz which is called Dark Jazz, or Doom Jazz which is a mix of dark athmospheres, weird soundscapes and e-piano. There’s two great bands I would recomend: Bohren and the Club of Gore and The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble. Check out the videos below:
Another great band I would recommend is Movits! Those Swedish guys created the perfect mix between Django Reinhard, Swing and Hip Hop. I’ve been listening to this a lot while drawing Gietz! It perfectly fitted with the mood of the comic, and was energetic enough to fuel my motivation!
I recently found this anthology named Pirat in my mailbox. It’s a project by Polish comic artist Mikolaj Spionek, who ask me for a contrubution some time ago. It’s really fun to see one’s creations translated into a foreign language…
It’s been a hot summer so far. Not only because of the climate we had here in the region, but also because I’ve been on fire with work! The consequence is that I have become a bit “lazy” in relation to this blog. On the other hand, now that things are cooling down a bit, I have a lot of stuff to talk about, so let’s start!
Giètz! is not the only music related work I’ve done in the last year. In fact as I had forseen, it’s been a very “musical” year so far!
I had the pleasure to create an illustration dedicated to the great band Pere Ubu for the venue Il circolo degli artisti in Rome. Pere Ubu is really a very inspiring band for my work.
Being a fan of 80s darkwave tunes and retro horror aesthetics I was more than pleased when the Italian fanzine group Lamette gave me the opportunity to create a comic about Bauhaus. This comic was also a great chance to test my “parasite” techniques on a black&white format. I chose to work with a style that takes a lot from old horror movies (like those starring Bela Lugosi), which works perfectly in b/w.
The last one, is also the oldes of the three. Its a comic inspired by the song Spiracle by Soap&Skin. To quote myself earlier:
Spiracle is a wonderful song by Austrian songwriter Anja Plaschg aka Soap&Skin,contained in her first (and still only) album Lovetune for Vacuum. Andrea Provinciali, one of the editors of Il Mucchio, asked me several months ago to participate in this project called Pencil Song, where comic artists are asked to reinterpret a song of their choice in comic form. It was around that time that I discovered Soap&Skin and her sound just made me want to draw something to it.
As a funny side note, the issue in which this comic appears, is fittingly numbered #666.
I’ve got several other music related project which I’m currently working on, so there’s more coming soon!
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!
As I had promised, I will start today with this little series of tutorials that show a bit of how I worked on Gietz!. In this first part I will focus on how I do the pencils of a comic page. Of course this is not intended to be the definitive guide on how to draw a comic, it’s just how I do it, but nonetheless I hope you can find something useful for your work in it.
1) Digital pencils
Since some time I stopped using real pencils to draw comics, instead I work directly in photoshop (with a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet). Usually I duplicate the document I’m working on, keeping a zoomed in version on one side, to work on the details, and the other one to keep an eye on the big picture.
To work in a digital fashion has several advantages, I can move, rotate, scale and duplicate panels or single elements. I can also do the lettering directly on the page and so have more control on the composition and use the page real estate in a more efficient way.
2) The right brush
Of course you could just use one of the standard round brushes Photoshop offers, and choose some grey colour. Personally I like to give it a bit of an “analogue” feeling, so I made my own brush. As a starting point I used one of the sampled brushes Photoshop has to choose from (I took one with a nice texture) and tweaked the settings.
First of all I set the size to 3px, which gives you a quite thin line, good for precise drawing. To be more flexible I tweaked both the size and opacity jitter and linked it with the pen pressure. For the Size I limited the jitter to 10%, but for the opacity it goes up to 50%. This is quite handy because it lets you start by drawing really light lines and adding darker ones while refining the drawing. I set the mode to “linear burn” and the opacity to 70% , this makes the lines become darker the more you draw on them.
Of course this is all very subjective, the best thing to do is to experiment until you find something that fits your taste and workflow. There’s also plenty of free brushes you can download from the web, some really nice ones you can find here: creativemac.digitalmedianet.com
3) Print the pencils
Although I find working with the tablet really great for pencils, I prefer to do the inking the old-fashioned way: with a brush on real paper. For this reason, once I’m done with this first step, I tint the lines to 100% cyan and print them out (the cyan makes the inking process and the scanning a lot easier).
To get the cyan lines I start off by checking that the background colour is white, then I open the “channels” panel. Here I select all the channels except the cyan one. I hit Control+A (Command+A on Mac OS) to select all of the canvas, then I hit CANC to delete the content of the selected channels.
IMPORTANT: if you use this tecnique, don’t delete the channels, only the content must be erased. The result in the panel should look somthing like here below (the thumbnails are all white):
After I’ve done this, the page looks more or less like this and I can print it. Usually I have to lighten it all up a bit, or it will print too dark. This depends a lot on the printer you will use though.
So, this is it for today! See you next week with the second instalment of this series: inking the page!
The good news is that Bolzano Comics is going pretty well so far!
The bad news is that I’m too busy to keep up with the hundred word stories so tomorrow there will be none. I’m sorry.
In the meantime I’ll keep you posted with pictures from the festival. Here’s us while setting up the Thomas Ott exhibition, which will be open till this saturday.
Ciucci is an Italian blog (by Marta aka Larsoniana) that features infantile works by famous Italian comic artists (like Ponticelli, just to name one). Funny to see how all this great artists have started their career! Today my first comic ever, that I made when I was about 6 or 7, has been featured on this blog, head over here to see it: ciucci.blogspot.com
This is a really old story by now. But I’ve never posted it anywhere, so here we go: Peter Panz, written by Riccardo Castelli,art by me.
This story is somehow important to me, since it was my comeback to a more deformed and humorous style after years passed trying to master academic, realistic, proportioned drawing, which apparently was never really what I was meant to be drawing anyway. This story probably helped a lot in realizing that.
My short comic Pixelfacehas just been awarded a Daily Deviation on deviantart.com. Yeah!
“*gasteropod takes pixelation to creepy new heights with his Pixelface comic comic. I particularly enjoy the clever transition of the later panels into pixels as the character transforms, and how everything is actually framed within the last panel.” (Suggested by `Iscariot-Priest and Featured by ^Cedarseed)
My short comic