Chuckdee: Marv from Sin City.

This is a pic done by a dude on Deviant art called Chuckdee. Deviant art is a great source for digital art, you can get lost there for hours.

"The original piece was done on gray paper with Microns, brush and copic grey markers... the rain and highlights were whiteout pen, and a white prismacolor pencil .... I couldn't resist tweaking it a bit in Photoshop and adding a bit of blood and slight glow to the rain!"

See more of his work at:

http://chuckdee.deviantart.com/

The Singularity: The expodential growth of technology, The emegence of A.I and life extension.

So science is getting pretty hardout. Craig Venter made headlines when he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute created "synthetic life". Basically what they did is made their own sequence for a genome. This genome was implanted into a single celled organism which could then begin to replicate like any living creature does.

Here's a vid of Craig Venter Talking about his truely Sci Fi discovery:

Fact: Science can now custom design organisms!

Combining that sort of discovery with genetic engineering quickly leads me on to thinking that we are soon gonna be able to design more complex organisms. Get the DNA code of a bat, put it with a cat, and not only do their names rhyme but that batcat will have sonar! (bad example, but imaging extracting the quality that makes a tiger massive and chucking it in a house cat. It would keep growing until it was huge. I doubt the science is as simple as that but the concept can't be far off!

With this new technology, made a reality by Craig Ventor it could be possible to make not only domestic tigers but giant freaking spiders and lizards. Even a..dragon..

Technology cannot be underestimated. It is growing at exponential rates. A fact that sees predicting the future pretty futile. One thing for sure is that computers are getting faster at an ever increasing rate. This is explained and expanded in a story done in TIME Magazine called 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. It has many predictions by Ray Kurzweil, a scientist who was awarded the Medal of Technology by Bill Clinton. He talks about the emergence of A.I (yes thats right, robots) and according to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away...

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299-1,00.html

The Process: I think I'm gonna ink it for real.

I've been trying to figure out how I'm gonna draw this comic. I first thought to do all of it with my tablet (on the computer (photoshop)) Which is fine when it comes to drafting: 

...But pretty shit when it comes to inking...

I think its due to a number of reasons. Its incredibly slow. And considering all I'm trying to do is immitate a real ink pen - it seems pretty wierd to put up with it. Also, because I can zoom in and out whenever I like while working on the line art, I don't get a true focal point. When your drawing on a real piece of paper, you can tell what distance the paper is suppose to be viewed at. Its usually about a foot and a half away. This means I know, when I'm drawing people or things in the distance, that they are not going to be that recognisable. So simplifying those things down into more obvious shapes helps with clarity and brings out the REAL focal point. Which is usually in the foreground.

The problem with inking on paper. Is when you f**k it up. You f**k it up. I have yet to find a good twink that doesn't effect the texture and bleed of the pen when you draw overtop.

When it comes to doing the colour, nothing beats digital. Hands down. Turn around. On the ground. Charlie Brown. So what I've been doing is drafting in photoshop on my wacom tablet:

Then printing it out (dulled down), Drawing over top with a 'Stabilo Permanent pen. (size 's' I think) and a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen ('s' as well) then scanning it back in.

For colouring, I bump up the whites as much as I can to get rid of the black (something that has not been that successful so far). Setting the layer to 'multiply' then colour underneath (using a number of layers).

With photoshop, you have unlimited range of colours to use. But I think it is better to limit your pallet. I used to re-use a lot of colours but just change them subtly. But I don't think this is the best. I like colour, but if your gonna have something nearing the same colour as something else, they may as well share that exact colour. I think it just looks...cleaner.

Also, this process didn't take that long. I did the Inking and colouring for these 3 in about 7 hours.

I also did this page today. FYI I wont be keeping those nuggety adverts...(in fact I probably wont be using any of these pages for the final comic)

Intro Scene: Frame by frame

So, I've posted this scene on the main page but the images are on two whole a3 pages so you can't read a thing. With bloggers new image scroller thing, this should be a nice way to view the draft scene.

Cosmo White

Cosmo White. An amazing illustrator and comic artist. With a lot of his work, he uses felt pen on bristol board. My guess is that he would make the physical drawing a lot larger than the standard 6x9 inch comic page. He would then scan the lined drawing into photoshop, then digitally colour it. Creating illustrations on a large scale seems to be a great advantage when your wanting to get smooth endless lines.

Here's a link to an interview with him and the other co-creators of Blue Spear, which is apparently a pretty kick ars comic, so I might have to get it..

http://www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/p/detail/bluespear-revisited-com-x-return-to-the-world-of-forty-five

I've joined comicblogelite.com so follow me!!

Networking is something I haven't really worked on for this comic...It's really important. Potentially, you could gain so much exposure. There are over 200million searches a day on the known search sites let alone the countless blogs and sites that are being scanned through. The internet is epic. If you don't exist on the net, you really don't exist at all.

So I've found this website called comicblogelite.com. It's great. Its lists a massive database of comic blogs.  The blogs at the top are the most frequently viewed and I've just registered my blog so set up some kind of spam bot that keeps looking at my site! Nah thats pretty hard out, I don;t expect you to do that. 

But yeah, I need to start roaming other peoples blogs and become their networking buddies. I need to get some comic blog friends. 

Updated Intro Scene: Communicating with the reader.

Its pretty apparent that this comic has a lot of new and strange futuristic concepts. I've spent a lot of time reworking the dialog and expanding some ideas so that the reader is not overloaded with new information. I reckon a good story has to be clear while also withholding key information to help hold interest. So this scene will explain some things, but will leave a lot to be further explained.

So communication has been the key word for me lately. I have been showing friends and family the intro scene and it seems that it is pretty fucking hard to understand. There is talk of all these wierd things like digi-dreaming set in a world that is still very unclear and unknown to the reader. In short, there are too many unknowns. So this version has a lot more clarity than other versions. It still leaves a lot of mystery, and could still be too vague in some area's (the flashback scene doesn't explain the idea of secure codes very well (but that might not be such a bad thing)) but I think it is beginning to work.

It's a draft, so its pretty messy. I have numbered the panels so you know where to go...