Gauge Theories are Cool
That is all.
(‘fraid you’ll have to wait for the finished book to learn why those shapes are relevant to the title…)
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Category Archives: sketches
QED and so forth…
(Spoiler!! 🙂 )
Talking about gauge invariance took a couple more pages than I planned…
The Red Shoes…
Well, this conversation (for the book) takes place in a (famous) railway station, so it would be neglectful of me to not have people scurrying around and so forth. I can’t do too many of these… takes a long time to draw all that detail, then put in shadows, then paint, etc. Drawing directly on screen saves time (cutting out scanning, adjusting the scan, etc), but still…
This is a screen shot (literally, sort of – I just pointed a camera at it) of a detailed large panel in progress. I got bored doing the […] Click to continue reading this post
More Hands…
I realized the other day, while on the train constructing more hands, that in this book I’m saddled with drawing lots of hands – almost more than any other single thing. Why? Well, this is a set of ten separate conversations, and most of the conversations take place when the people involved are sitting together. They’re not moving around so much, not flying or fighting as in an adventure or hero comic (sorry if you’re hoping for that) – they’re relatively still. As you might have observed about people, when they are sitting, they mostly adopt the same one or two poses for long stretches. The changes from moment to moment are not so great, and then they mostly cycle from one position to […] Click to continue reading this post
Old School
Doing a bit of old school inking for part of a page yesterday.
Brush, india ink, bristol… brought tears to my eyes*.
-cvj
*Mostly been digital inking/pencilling these days, sadly… time is of the essence. Click to continue reading this post
Of Spies and Spacetime
Stephanie DeMarco interviewed me a few weeks ago for an article she was writing about the science in the TV show Agent Carter (season two). As you know, I did a lot of work for them on the science, some of which I’ve mentioned here, and we spoke about some of that and a lot of interesting other things besides. Well, her article appeared in Signal to Noise magazine, a publication all about communicating science, and it’s really a nice piece. You can read it here. (The excellent title I used for this post is from her article.)
It is a pity that the show has not been renewed for a third season (I’m trying not […] Click to continue reading this post
Gestures
I’m trying to make the characters somewhat expressive, since you, the book’s reader, will be spending a lot of time with them. This means constructing lots of hands doing things. Lots of hands. Hands take time, but are actually rather fun to construct from scratch. I start mine as two or three planes hinged together, and then go from there, subdividing until I’m done.
Gut Feeling…
Still slowly getting back up to speed (literally) on page production. I’ve made some major tweaks in my desktop workflow (I mostly move back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator at this stage), and finally have started keeping track of my colours in a more efficient way (using global process colours, etc), which will be useful if I have to do big colour changes later on. My workflow improvement also now includes […] Click to continue reading this post
Realization…
When you realize mid-sketch that your character is wearing a watch, and so that means you should probably go back and add it to all the previous pages and panels… (click for larger view.)
Close Encounter?
…of the physics kind.
Ok, I’ll share a bit during my lunch break from spending too much time doing detail in a tiny panel few will linger on. (Perils of a detail-freak….) It’s a rough underdrawing I did this morning for a panel I’m now turning into final art (the black stuff is the start of final lines). That’s the character you saw a turnaround for earlier, busy at work in a cafe when… (To be continued…)
Every Now and Then…
Here’s a character turnaround I finished today. It is a sign that I’m about to delve into finished art on one of the stories in the book. Finally. Been a long time since I’ve done that, but I’ve been building up to it. Only 3 months later than I’d planned.
What’s a turnaround? Sort of self-explanatory name I hope. Its purpose? It is […] Click to continue reading this post
Yay, McCloud!
(Click sketch for larger view.) I was only able to make it to one scheduled event in the LA Times Festival of Books this year. (Family constraints.) Normally I go to a few at least, getting my tickets for the panels in advance and going along and listening to authors, writers, editors, and other book-related people having a discussion about some topic or other. If I’m honest, for about 80-85% of such panels or interviews I come away wondering why on earth I went because everyone said the standard things I thought they’d say. But that 10-15% can be great, and you never know where it’ll show up – which event, which writer, during which Q&A… So for that reason I come expecting to get good extra value from listening to the conversations around me in the line and in the audience, and of I course bring my sketchpad and try to see if there’s someone interesting to sketch while I listen.
As usual, for panels involving graphic books or comics, there’s almost always someone in the audience who is working on a sketch of some sort. People who appreciate that form often find value in sketching and often do it (or some sort of doodle) themselves as a pastime, and that’s a great thing. If I’m not the only one and if I’m sitting at the right angle, I often get the fun opportunity to sketch a sketcher, and that is what happened during the interview of Scott McCloud on […] Click to continue reading this post
It Came from Elsewhere…
This just in. Marvel has posted a video of a chat I did with Agent Carter’s Reggie Austin (Dr. Jason Wilkes) about some of the science I dreamed up to underpin some of the things in the show. In particular, we talk about his intangibility and how it connects to other properties of the Zero Matter that we’d already established in earlier episodes. You can see it embedded below […] Click to continue reading this post
Getting Graphic…
Here’s a piece by Michelle Boston of Dornsife News that might unpack my graphic book project for you, a least a little bit.
The link is here. She interviewed me about it a while ago, and this is the result…
Enjoy!
Another Digital Drill
I found some time to do another practice digital sketch to get my skills back into shape. (Click for larger view.) I’ll admit I had fun with the three-color scheme for skin tones. For the three of you who recognize her, evidently there was another showbiz magazine article laying around for me to squint at. Yeah, her nose is too long. I’m not going to sweat it.
I figured the best way to stop me from further obsessing […] Click to continue reading this post
