Progress continues on Delilah Dirk and the Full Length Graphic Novel. I am well-ensconced in the line-art process, where I’m making some dark, clean lines on top of the squiggly blue ones. You can sort of see the the process in action above, as I’ve plucked out the strands of meaning in dark lines while the chaos of the blue roughs swirl underneath. It’s been a preeetty slow process so far, and I’m getting about 2-3 pages done per day. Usually two. Thirteen pages were completed last week, and I’ve got a lot of pages to get through, so as you can imagine, this is probably going to take a while.

Working on paper means I don’t have to turn the computer on each morning, though, which is nice. It also means I’ll update the blog less. In fact, I will post so infrequently that older posts will probably start disappearing. It’s negative posting. ZOOP.

Look at this, and let me tell you what it is. As I do, you should realize that it’s pretty awesome. LiveJournal user “manintheboat” has taken a smart-aleck line from Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople and made a real-life thing out of it. It is “Blood of My Enemies Tea”, and it is pictured above (along with the wishbones of My Enemies’ Turkeys). For the full (long) list of ingredients (which, sadly, includes no actual blood of My Enemies), take a look at manintheboat’s LiveJournal post. You can also see a photo of her crazy alchemical tea-making laboratory.

If you haven’t read the comic, at one point Delilah Dirk is imprisoned. Selim brings her some tea, as a gesture of kindness, but she responds:

Thinking about this warms the cockles of my cold, mechanical robot heart.

No matter how much I work in colour, I can’t seem to get really comfortable. I thought for this one, I might try a limited-palette, solid-colour approach, similar to this image (read the whole article on the artist here, at Leif Peng’s wonderful Today’s Inspiration site). I couldn’t get it to work, though, since I hadn’t started the drawing with that colouring style in mind. As a result, I didn’t design the image with enough big, solid, shapes or with the big contrasty hits of black. On images like this, I have usually failed to think in terms of colour, focusing instead on the shapes, the linework, and describing the things that I am trying to make an image of. That carries over to the colouring so that instead of really visualizing the image as a colour composition, I end up basically colouring within the lines, like a fancy colouring book. It becomes a technical exercise, where the new challenge is giving everything a colour and value that will approximately balance the composition now that it’s in colour and not just black and white lines. I would like to be thinking, “how can I use colour in this image to create the composition” rather than, “well, her boots are brown cause her boots are supposed to be brown, so how do I either mute their colour or compensate elsewhere so they don’t stick out”. I need to be using the colour purposefully and confidently, rather than as an “add-on” or a technicality. So I’m going to have to start thinking ahead.

That said, I enjoy the way images like this turn out, but the process is still too fiddly and technical-feeling.

Blah blah blah. Here’s some images and notes on the process…

Picked up a Canon Pro 9000 printer the other day based on the universal recommendation of my peers. It is enormous. Spent the morning hooking it up, figuring it out, and I think I’ve finally arrived at some decent results for printing out enlargements of my rough pages.

The roughs are tightened in Photoshop in greyscale, then I change ‘em to CMYK and add a Gradient Map adjustment layer to the top of the layer stack. The gradient is 30% cyan on one end, white on the other. I I send it to the printer, letting Photoshop manage the colours. Feed some Strathmore Bristol into the front-load slot on the printer, click, press, whirr, and hey – I have an 11×17 blue printout of my rough page, ready to clean.

When they’re scanned back in in RGB, removing the blue channel does a very acceptable job of sucking the rough out of the page. Yay.

Gonna spend tomorrow printing out the rest of Chapter 2, then I’ll finally get to peel myself away from this computer for some real drawing. Tightening the roughs has taken roughly two months, and I’m tired of this desk and this chair.

Anyone want to make a wager as to how many pages I can get through before the blue print cartridges expire?

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Here’s something I started in order to test out some new paper. Also to try and bludgeon myself into not hating the Regency-period style of dress that I had unwittingly committed myself to.

Some work-in-progress pics after the jump…

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