Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
A quick comparison (pt.2)…
With the next story I was more abitious, I wanted to tell a story that had a bigger arc, and to get more into character and cosequence. I ruffly planed it to be about 21 pgs ( it ended up being 27 pgs.) in full color and I wanted to find a way to clean up the ruff layouts with no pencil stlye clean up line. After playing around a bit in photoshop I arrived at what you see below..
The schedule I set for myself this time was about a month and 1/2, 2 months tops, Right.. I think I worked everyday after work for 4 months straight, I started at 10pm and ended between 3-6 in the am, weekends I worked 8-10 hours each day. The Learning curve on this story was much more intense I really thought at one point that I wasn’t going to finish. The process of finishing this story was new, I did have a theoratical production pipeline with photoshop, which was this: ruff out layouts on paper and scan them, clean up in b&w (in photoshop) and then color using hue saturation layers in photoshop. That meant I had to keep characters on a different layer from th bg so I could copy over character colors to other pages, copy over the bg color base to other pages. It Seemed economical and that was the only part of my initial plan that worked more or less like I thought, everhing else took more time than I thought. All I wanted was to finish in time to go to print with the hope that I maintained the essence of the story that sparked it all, I did it and it will be in Afterworks 2.
on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 4:05 pm:
I can’t tell you how much your work has helped me out in the last few months since I found this site. Your sense of story and character are fantastic. There really should be more of you. Say like 5 more?
These locations seem very specific. Are you working with reference photos or is this drawn from memory and experience?
Are those textures scanned in or did you create them in Photoshop. If done all natural, I can see where the time went.
I can’t wait to see the full product. Excellent work my friend.
Thanks for delivering the cool.
k.
on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 11:31 pm:
thank you k, Inspiration is always good to come by.
I think that any location you draw should be rooted in a familiar
place otherwise the specifics of the location won’t feel right. My working method right now is research-research-research first, then draw and find the familiar in it. Photo reference is good but so is going to a location sketching specifics that made you go there. Drawing from memory by itself almost always fail me.
As far as textures go, in the story below I scanned old paper for an effect, but for this one it’s all done digital. No prefab parts placed because since its digital, I wanted more of a painterly feel.
I’ve waxed too much, take care,
lo
on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 1:54 pm:
Louis,
thanks man..
Love your work, and unfortunately was looking to score a copy of the newest Afterworks this year at the con, but change of plans and I’m not able to attend… so please, please stop teasing me and fix the colored image link of the Hell of a Game image. It gives a 404 not found error…
Bob MacNeil
bobmacneil.blogspot.com
www.taminglight.com
on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 12:33 am:
We always enjoy seeing your work. I love the monotone art…strong characters and setups!
We’ll add you to our links. Thanks for the terrific inspiration. Cheers,
~Arna and John
on Saturday, August 5th, 2006 at 1:17 pm:
I like your blog and was wondering where I would be able to find afterworks here in canada. I used to color comics and we used to make color palettes for all our characters. Having it at the side you can easily reference any color for any character. Hope this helps seems like you are working really hard and can’t wait to see your newest work.
on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 1:09 pm:
Good luck with the new book where can I can a hold of one, I sure your very busy so no rush I have’nt been able to see the last few post the image are x’d out for some reason but I sure it’s dope work well don’t work to hard this week peace and take care!!!
on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 11:10 pm:
hey all, thanks for your kind comments, I’m not personaly selling copies of the book because it was published by Image comics. It is my hope that copies of the book should be in your local comic book store, if not there, then I heard amazon and Barnes and Nobles is selling them. If you still can’t find one send me a email and I’ll see what I can do.
For now I’m going to try and fix the image errors, I’ve been trying to figure out why its not working, I’ll fix it soon.
lo
on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 4:09 am:
Hey Louis,
I just got a copy of Afterworks 2. Man, you and Sohn tore it up! Your story looks amazing and is a great read. Really great stuff Louis, you should be very proud.
on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 5:32 am:
Just picked up afterworks 2@ comic relief. Great posing and expresions in your story, and a really funny story over all
on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 6:20 am:
I’m missing the updates man. You must be busy. Are you going to do Afterworks 3?
on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 11:24 am:
Wow, I bought Dumping Grounds a few years back (I think) but just found Afterworks 2 in a comic shop. Your story was great! It’s really nice to see how you chose this process. I’ve never seen anything done quite like it before, and it worked out perfect. Working in B&W really keeps the values solid when taking it to color.