Remember when I said I’d add my latest comic into my shoppe? I also promised to post the original art for the cover, didn’t I? Yes, I think I did. Well, here it is! You may also recall that I promised to wax romantic about yellow ink. I’m not so sure I can go quite that far. Lately my roving eye has been ogling magenta. In fact, I can’t remember why I decided to use yellow in the first place. Ah, but aren’t I getting ahead of oneself. You probably want to know what the hell I’m doing putting yellow ink all over an otherwise perfectly fine drawing.

It all started with Farmy Acres, and it’s notorious black+one color scheme. Basically I wanted my still-cogent inker self to indicate to my future late night computer colorist self where to put the color. In the old days, comic book artists would draw thin outlines as “color holds” to indicate where the colorist (who was of course a different person) should drop a shadow, for instance. I’m one person and I have Photoshop, so I figured I could do better than that.

On Dan Clowes’ art for Ghost World, the secondary blue color is indicated by cyan ink right on the original drawing. I use cyan “no-photo blue” pencils to sketch things out, so I can’t use blue to also indicate a color separation. The pencils would get all mixed in and it’d all go to hell! It occurred to me that instead I could probably just draw with one of the other two process colors. I got ahead of myself again. Process colors. They’re the four colors with which most things in color are printed. But you knew that. The reason I figured I should stick with them is you can look at your Photoshop art broken down into its component color channels. This makes it really easy to find and select something that is 100% made up of just one of those colors.

Well, I know I’ve said how much I love using colored ink. A whole spectrum of ink bottles is arrayed by my drawing table every day. So, I just started dipping my pen, and eventually my brush, into the little glass bottle full of yellow. For some reason I didn’t use magenta. I really can’t remember why.

Anyhow, I’ve been doing it for a few months now, and did so for this cover design, as you can tell. I wanted the cover pages to look like title cards from an old cartoon. I pulled together elements from Looney Tunes, Disney (“A Walt Disney Donald Duck. Technicolor.”), and Tom & Jerry. Using a lightbox, I put my Bristol paper over a 1/10″ grid to make the letterforms consistant.

See the crayon stuff above the front cover? I used that for a spotlight behind the lettering. You know, like old title cards.

Did you make it all the way down here?? Gee, you must really need to kill some time! Wull…thanks.