UPDATE: since I wrote this article I’ve produced a whole EP using (among other synths) the Shruthi-1, you can find it here (comes as a free download) its-the-end-ep-free-download
On the 14th of April I received a small parcel with a couple of pcbs, some ICs, resistors, capacitors and all the other stuff you need to build an electronic device. It was my Shruti-1 kit, and I had been among the very (very!) few lucky people to get one!
Before I had gotten the kit I had already started to sketch out some ideas on how to build a case for it. The kit was only containing the electronic parts needed to get it going, the case was up to the builder. This is actually a great thing, because people have come up with very interesting and creative cases for this little musical beast (check this site here to see some of them).
Anyway once built the synth would look like this, not really something you could carry to a gig…
for a long time I have been clinging to my initial design, which btw. was somehow inspired by the Tivoli Model One radio (whose minimalist retro design I love so much). I asked a friend of mine, who is a carpenter by trade, to help me to build that case, and I decided to have the faceplate and the backplate (with the connections) laser-cut by Ponoko.com.
Sometimes I have time to work on things like this, sometimes, I’m too swaped with work to do anything else, so it took me some time to come up with a working design. I sent all the data to Ponoko and waited for them to send me the stuff back. I waited for several weeks, because UPS lost my parcel somewhere on the way, and it took them 2 weeks to decide that it was lost and Ponoko (or better their Italian partner Vectorealism) had them lasered again.
In the meantime I went to the sea, got swamped by work again, my friend was swamped with work as well and then he went to the sea… and the Shruti-1 was still there on my desk catching dust and risking to break for good. In fact it even fell to the floor one time, and the LCD pcb got loose so that I had to solder it again.
In the end I couldn’t stand the situation anymore and just created a new, Ponoko-only design. Sent the cutting data over and got the cut pieces pretty fast (today). Sat down, sticked everything together and now finally the long story is over, and my Shruti-1 has finally found a decent shell!
The building process was not really painless though, I have made several mistakes, forgot some holes, made some others too small, miscalculated some factors. All in all I’d say I’m happy with the result though! Now what new device could I build?
Here’s some pictures of the making process and the finished piece!
(photos are courtesy by Sbrizz, who I would like to thank for the help and support!)
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 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!
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!
Jazz Friday today brings you some making-of goodness. Here’s a step-by-step gallery of page 7 from Gietz!Step 1: Every page I draw starts as a storyboard. This is usually really small and just serves the purpose of arranging the panels. Sometimes I redraw the storyboard a couple of times until I think it’s good enough to proceed with the rest. Sometimes I already try to work out some lighting, but usually I don’t . Step 2: pencils time! I used to draw these the analogue way with a real pencil, but now I moved on to the more practical Wacom tablet. Drawing it directly on the screen gives me more tools to move, copy-paste and correct stuff. Step 3: work out lighting. On complex pages I usually print out the pencils to try some lighting solutions before I do the final inking. It takes less time to do 4 of these than to do the inking twice. Step 4: ink the pencils. I usually turn the pencils to 100% cyan and print them on a suitable paper, then ink them with a Pentel Pocket Brush (I’ll do a tutorial about this soon!). Sooner or later I’ll find a lot mistakes and re-draw and re-ink parts of the page. That’s why some parts look pretty different than in the pencils. Step 5: scan, add a half-tone in Photoshop and do the lettering. For Gietz! I’ve decided to print with a brownish ink instead of the usual black, so the final result should look something like this.
Jazz Friday talks about music, art and probably a lot about my latest comic Gietz. Jazz Friday will be published weekly, each Friday. Jazz Friday will feature “making of” and “behind the scenes” content, as well as some tutorials. Jazz Friday is something I have been wanting to do for some time now… And now… let’s get on with it!
Gietz, the origins, or… why did I accept to do this in the first place?
First sketch I made of the protagonist, Nico
Sometimes I still ask myself, why did I accept to work on this comic? I was already sick of historical stuff, of stories dealing with reality, of documentaries and documentation. Round and Round had proved that, this was not the type of comics I wanted to be working on. So why draw Gietz? The answer is: there’s nothing I like more than a good challenge… and Gietz was a huge challenge for me. Fortunately it wasn’t a real historical comic. Though the story is set in a precise time (the fifties in Italy) the plot and the main characters are all fictional. For me the challenge was to work on something bigger than what I had done until then (the longest story I drew was 33 pages). The 130 pages of Gietz looked like a good exercise, and in fact they were. I’ve learned a lot of things from this work. First of all I refined my techniques, I learned to keep on fighting even when I could no more. I have become a lot better in evaluating and managing my time and I have developed a lot of tricks to make work easier and quicker (tricks I will be talking about soon!) This will probably be the last comic of this kind I will be working on for some time, from now on I want to focus more on my deformed, grotesque style, but forcing myself to draw this way has been very important. The other reason why I have accepted to work on this project is certainly my interest for the relationship between music and comics. I have always found it to be a really fascinating one. Not only because I love music, as I love comics, but because I think that these two languages somehow complement each other well. So, while Gietz might be the last comic of this kind for me, I’m really glad I had the chance to be working on it!
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.
I always find it very interesting to see how other artists get from the first drawings to the final piece. So I decided to show this process in my works.
This was the last episode of this tutorial series. But don’t worry, I have a lot more to tell you about this project!
