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?

^ ENORMOUS.

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…

Above: the image scanned (in parts) and stitched together. Also before a few small Photoshop tweaks – correcting a bit of a slant in DD’s face and shrinking Selim’s head a bit.

Above: the same image as at the top of the post, just for comparison.

Above: detail.

Update. Work continues steadily on Delilah Dirk: I will finish the roughs for the last chapter tomorrow. Then it’s time to print ‘em out and clean up the artwork. I’m going to be trying a method that seems to be working for our friend Kazu. You start with small thumbnails (four pages per 8.5×11″ sheet), scan ‘em in, blow ‘em up, and clean up over that. My thumbs aren’t as clean as Kazu’s, so I’ve been tidying them up in Photoshop so that they’re legible to strangers (to get a better idea early on of how the book will read). I’ll probably do a writeup on the process later on, assuming it doesn’t completely fail for me.

Internet Fiddling. I have a Livejournal account and now a Posterous account. This post should be on Livejournal thanks to Posterous’s autoposting features. Theoretically, I email posterous, it posts the post there and simultaneously posts it to my Livejournal and my Twitter feed. Neat concept – I like the “connected-ness” of Posterous, and the autoposting to Livejournal means I don’t have to abandon one format to embrace another. It’s like if Microsoft had included email forwarding in Hotmail, I wouldn’t have to go back every now and then to make sure no one’s trying to reach me through an address I haven’t used in years since embracing Gmail.

Google is Terrifying. Does anyone else worry about the ubiquity of Google? I just installed Google Analytics on my site. I use Gmail (and so technically, it’s scanning all my communication as it looks for words to base the advertising off). I use a bunch of other Google stuff. They own Youtube. I’m sure there are other, more well-informed explorations of this issue, but what if Google went evil one day? I’m a bit scared.

Flickr. At least the internet’s favorite image host is owned by Yahoo. Sure, Google has Picasa, but it feels like Flickr has more people under its umbrella. Anyway, I filled out an account. You can check it out if you like, there’s some drawings and stuff there. Frustrating that I had to sign up for some stupid Yahoo ID to use it. Since it remembers who I am, I’ll only very rarely have to remember that stupid ID to log in, which means that I’ll forget it every effing time.

I should be wasting less time on the internet, more time making comics.

Perhaps you need some more adventure in your life. Perhaps you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing for the last few months. While the former is probably more likely, I’m happy to present some news which will satisfy both options.

There will be a Delilah Dirk graphic novel. I’ve been referring to it as “The Oriental Lieutenant”, which is a title that may or may not stick. On the one hand, from a 19th century Western perspective, “The Orient” included Turkey. On the other hand, current popular understanding makes “The Orient” out to be China, Thailand, etc. On the mystical and unexpected third hand, it could stand to be a more exciting title. So, for the time being, it will be Book One until I come up with something better.

“That implies that there will be more than one book, ” I hear you scream through the Inter-Nets. Your screams ring true! I intend to make a few DD graphic novels. Last October, I spent the month writing story treatments for a handful of different projects, two of which were Delilah Dirk stories. Since then I have roughed out the first book, as in the image above. That’s a montage of all the pages of rough roughs for Book One. Yesterday I finished cleaning them up into working roughs, from which I’ll complete the clean artwork.

Maybe you think that seems like a long time to rough out a book. You’d be wrong if you didn’t know that about a third of the book is completed material. Book One will include Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople as Chapter One, and Delilah Dirk and the Aqueduct as Chapter Three. Those are respectively the single-issue story I published through Lulu.com and my DD Flight story. There will be a new chapter between them and a new chapter after Aqueduct. If you are mathematically inclined, you will notice the incongruity between adding two chapters to a total of four and having completed one third of the book already. Well, the new chapters are longer!

Next steps! I had roughed out two versions of Chapter 4, and while tightening the first version (which I thought was better), I’ve realized that the second is, in fact, the better one. So I’ll be tightening that. After that, I can move on to linework. Meanwhile, I get to figure out how to get this thing published. Exciting times! More news as it happens!

Hey there, Internet! It is 2010 – the official start of The Future. Each year I’ve been more and more disappointed at the refusal of flying cars to allow themselves to be invented. However, if you had told me ten years ago that I would have a little calculator-sized device on which I could store my whole music collection and check my e-mail (what’s an “e-mail”?) and even watch moving video images beamed telemagically into my device on invisible waves, I would have laughed you into a puddle. Same goes for if you had told me that I would prefer to spend my time reading through a column of 140-character ramblings of friends and celebrities over watching a television programme.  I had become so preoccupied waiting for the future I thought would arrive that I hardly noticed how much things had changed. And that’s just my iPod Touch – nevermind all the other crazy things that have happened (for example, people stopped saying “hella” and “rad”).

So maybe this year will be the year I stop waiting for the flying car. I’m going to get a new kitchen faucet and sink, I’m going to renovate the bathroom, and I’m going to finish a graphic novel (more on that later, I promise). I’m excited to find out what this purported Apple tablet might mean for comic books (it could be an awesome medium). I’m going to try to play video games a little less, and I will probably fail. But at least I won’t be waiting for the flying car.

To you who’s reading this – happy New Year to you, and I hope it is a good year with many successes, free from trouble, strife, and sickness. I will endeavour to provide more compelling content here, and when I fail at that, I will at least provide more content. If you’ll let me, I’ll be a part of your 2010, and you’ll be a part of mine, and it’ll be hella rad.

I’m cleaning up* my rough thumbnails using Photoshop, and I’ve been wondering why the later pages have been taking longer to tighten than the earlier pages. Now I know – I had unintentionally been making things more complex. I guess it’s not a bad thing?

Also, if anyone knows why my greyscale images are about three shades darker when I export them from Photoshop versus when I’m working on them in Photoshop, I’d love to know. Tony dot Cliff at gmail dot com.

*It’s a relative term.

I got a nice email today complaining about the spastic frequency between postings on this blog. So here’s a new one, the first for a few months.

The problem is that the things I seem to end up working on are usually NDAed so I can’t share them until much later, or – like the example above – they spend a long time in a really unpresentable state. Like, I spent October working on four different writing projects. Then, in November, I did both NaNoWriMo and the rough story work for the project above. Not sure how to turn a few hundred pages’ worth of drawing into something worth looking at. Oh wait, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

Anyway, if you’re up for some rough drawings and comic panels without dialogue, there’s gonna be a lot of those over the next few weeks.