Monday, June 09, 2008

Bluejacket

Above is just a little taste of the type of art to expect in the Bluejacket story appearing in the Josh Medors benefit book PULP TALES that B. Clay Moore, Seth Peck and I have been working on. While this piece won't appear in the book I am taking the same approach to coloring the sequential pages as you see here.
For this tale everything will be hand colored with Prismacolor markers (and a teeny bit of colored pencil). The reason for this is about 50% because I think slick computer colors would look out of place with a pulp yarn, and 50% because I have yet to find the time to learn how to color in Photoshop;)
It may be a bit time consuming taking this route but I'm actually really glad I did. There have been plenty of happy accidents along the way, but they all add up to a product I couldn't be more proud of, and I had a really fun time working on.
Please be sure to pick up/order yourself a copy. No need to wait for the trade here folks. This is the only place you'll find the debut of Bluejacket.

5 comments:

Seth said...

Great effing job, man!
I think you're right-on about the style matching the genre better, & as someone who has done both I find that the markers are often faster than p-shop; its just harder to get good scans of full-color pages.

Shane White said...

Great stuff as per usual. BTW are you coloring on the originals or copies? Just curious as I know overtime some markers are not lightfast and bleed a slow death.

I've often wanted to color in marker as well...I'm just afraid of running out of the colors that I use and not being able to replace them. :\

=s=

Alan said...

Love the style and feel of this. I've tried to use packs of brushpens (sold as Manga artist pens)in shades of grey, but I find it's a problem to get even coverage over large areas.

Jack Miller said...

VERY nicely done, indeed. It's got quite a Doc Savage feel to it, which perhaps is the intention. I look forward to reading the completed piece.

I can completely relate to your problem RE: computer coloring. I find anything I feel I HAVE to color is best done the old-fashioned way -- colored pencils or markers -- or I might as well not bother, although I'm getting better at computer coloring a little bit at a time... a lot of it seems to be selecting the right brushes/strokes and figuring out the bells and whistles that can help you.

Keep up the good work, Chris!

Chris Samnee said...

Yeah, I'm super excited about seeing this in print. BJ is the kind of comics I love reading, and I have a just had a blast designing all this stuff and working on the sequentials.