Slaughterman's Coming, Cancertown's Back!

It's been a great few days for my creator-owned projects.

From yesterday all 6 chapters of Cancertown: An Inconvenient Tooth are back on the Playstation network as a digital comic, published through Markosia and complete with audio commentary from Cy Dethan and I. Well, Cy does most of the talking, clocking in a couple of hours of facinating insights spread over the chapters, while I chip in with a few art process snippets. The first chapter is free, so if you have a PSP why not check it out. Markosia have also announced that Cancertown will be coming back into print sometime later in 2011.

Look at that beautiful cover! Harry Markos at Markosia has also let us announce that Slaughterman's Creed will launch at Bristol International Comic Expo! Above is the all-but-finished graphic novel cover (pencils by myself with digital paints from Ryan Brown). Cancertown went down a storm 2 years ago at it's Bristol launch so we're hoping things will go as well for Slaughterman's Creed. It'll also be in stores some time after that. Must book some flights now...

Carving it out...

UPDATE: Added Andy's inks for this page.

Over own his blog, Cy Dethan is showing off some of my favourite new pencilled pages from the later chapters of Slaughterman's Creed, including this one below for which I've shown the layout, blue line, then pencils:

I've started using blue line again as I find its helpful at differentiating between my scribbles and the tighter pencils, so Andy Brown, who's inks can be seen above, should have an easier time at it.

Slaughtered in bits...

Since Cy's posted the black and white art for the first two pages of Slaughterman's Creed over at his blog I thought I show a breakdown of the first splash page.

Layout:

Loose pencils:

Inks (with a subtle bit of pencil shading):

I'm sure I added a good bit more pencilling after the rough second stage but I cant find a scan of it on my computer. The above version was designed to be cropped and you can see the final over at Cy's blog.

On another note, I'm not sure if I've mentioned before but Cancertown is now available to order through your local comic store in the UK via Diamond. So if you prefer to purchase your graphic novels that way you can let your retailer know the Previews code is JUL091827.

I'm a big dirty cheat!

I've been experimenting with adding a few digital touches to my artwork in an attempt to a/ speed things up b/make it look more precise and c/so not to mess up the original page while experimenting.

This is an early panel from Slaughterman's Creed as it appears inked on the original hand drawn page:


And below is an ink splash I scanned (its in my Slaughterman's Creed 'tools' folder) and turned into a Photoshop brush. I now have my own custom 'blood' brush that I can change size, layer and shape around the art without making big splashy mistakes on paper (there's no undo when you cover up to much art with a big blob):

For the edited version below I filled in the blacks on the left just using a standard photoshop brush and the paint bucket tool, drew the tiles also using the brush (and holding shift which makes straight lines). I also added a bit of jitter in the brush options so the lines dont look too clean and photoshoppery.

I added the blood on a new layer with a couple of simple clicks (or taps with the wacom pen) on a seperate layer and erased the parts I wanted a little clearer. The blood being on a different layer also means it can be easily turned red at the colouring stage if thats what's needed. Lastly I used the rectangular Marquee tool and Stroke tool to tidy up the borders.

And done.

I'm away on holiday this week but I'll try to update on Sunday anyway. If not I'll update as usual next Wednesday.

Blooood...

Here's that piece I was talking about.

Cy Dethan's written a pretty gory and disturbing script for this project (and I mean that in the best possible way) so I've tried to match that in this little concept piece.

I'm stepping up and handling full art chores on Slaughterman's Creed and I had fun creating some 'blood splatter' and 'chain link' brushes in photoshop.

Its my first time doing full colours on a project this size so here's hoping I won't have a nervous breakdown somewhere in the middle. Hopefully you won't really notice, but I've gone straight from pencil for the image above and darkened it in photoshop (apart from the hooks which I drew with the 'pen' tool in photoshop). I tend to draw pretty tightly, so hopefully skipping the inks will make up some of the colouring time. I'll give it a few pages and see how it works out, if I don't like it I'll be whipping out the brushes :)