Alrightch’all, I know I’ve only been giving you dribs and drabs lately. Hell, just a bunch of sketchbook doodles. I know. And I’m sorry. It’s time we got to some meat and potatoes. Or at least some seitan and wild rice. Would you like to see how I made another cover drawing, with colored inks and all? Well tough noogies, ’cause that’s what you’re getting!
I was asked by fellow CCSer/Springsteen fanatic Nomi Kane to draw the cover for an anthology she edited featuring stories set in a fictional Arizona town called San Papel. It was inspired by a papercraft kit assistant editor Jon Fine was assembling at the end of last semester. Despite these humble, cute beginnings, Tales from San Papel is filled with some pretty tough stories of predatory people in the mean, wild West. And some talking animals.
I’m not gonna go into as much detail concerning tools or the sketching process this time as I did with the Oak & Linden #1 cover, but I’ve got lots of pictures to show you, and lots of them you can click to see bigger. Suffice it to say that the pre-production was long and tortuous, with lots of different concept scribbles, and lots more of monogram sketches that I didn’t use for anything.
Then I spent a day making a big chunk of Victorian Arts & Crafts-y text, only to scrap it because it took up too damn much space (plus all the creators are credited in the table of contents, their individual pieces, and a contributors page at the back, so this would probably be some seriously narcissistic over kill on the cover).
I tried to make up for time I’d lost making that by rushing headfirst into the actual cover drawing, with little more than a doodle of a coyote twisted up in some barbed wire to guide me. That was a mistake.
I suppose it isn’t terrible, but I felt like it needed more breathing room, that the image wasn’t clear, that the coyote’s body should have more of a sense of twisting and bending over itself, and that the page design could use some bolder shapes. So then I did some actual thumbnail sketches, flipped over the piece of bristol I was drawing on, and drew the following.
Now for the inks, with a good helping of white out. I drew the ear at least three times before I liked it, and the coyote’s back I eventually had to paste-up with some new paper. This is more what my inks usually look like (as opposed to the Oak & Linden drawing, which I was crazy careful with because I did inks and colors on the same piece of paper). You can see I keep my pencils fairly loose and make a lot of changes at this stage (check out the buildings and mountains, and the coyote’s head). I don’t know if this is artsy-fartsy talk, but I think it keeps some spontaneity in the line.
Then I drew the title, on a separate piece of paper, which is unusual for me. In this case, I did the cover drawing at print size. I wanted to draw the lettering at “half up” so I could give it the detail that it deserves. So I did.
I put ‘em together with Photoshop, and here it is: the cover in glorious black & white, trimmed to eighth-inch bleeds.
Now, this time I tried an old-school comics coloring technique I’ve learned here at CCS. I printed the inks in 50% cyan on a sheet of watercolor paper, and then colored on that. The true old-fashioned technique is to to also print the inks in black on a transparency which you can use to see what the color will look like with the black over it. I don’t have any transparencies for my inkjet printer, and I didn’t want to face the below-zero winds of Vermont to get down to a laser printer at school last night. So I did without. I did have some trouble. When I wet the paper, I lifted a lot of the cyan ink and spread it everywhere. I don’t know if I should have waited longer to put water to the thing, or if inkjet ink really hates printing onto sized paper, or what, but consider yourselves warned if you plan to try this sort of thing. Anyhow, here that is.
Put ‘em all together and whattayou get?
