I finished that short story project for that anthology I told you about and submitted the final files to the editor on Sunday. Hurrah. (Don’t confuse this with my non-fiction science graphic book to appear in the Fall!) The anthology will appear next year and I’ll give you a warning about when it is to appear once they announce the book. It was fun to work on this story. The sample above is a couple of process shots of me working (on my iPad) on an imagining of the LA skyline as it might look some decades from now. I’ve added several buildings among the ones that might be familiar. It is for the opening establishing shot of the whole book. There’s one of San Francisco later on, by the way. (I learned more about the SF skyline and the Bay Bridge than I care to admit now…)
I will admit that I went a bit overboard with the art for this project! I intended to do a lot rougher and looser style in both pencil work and colour and of course ended up with far too much obsessing over precision and detail in the end (as you can also see here, here and here). As an interesting technical landmark, almost the entire story was done on my iPad. This is partly because I was travelling for a lot of the time I worked on it (and also my portable Cintiq started playing up). A lot of iPad work was done for parts of my workflow for the book (the complete book of mine coming out in the Fall), but this is the first time I’ve done pretty much everything – rough pencils, final pencils, painting – of a substantial work (20 page full colour story) on the iPad. Would not have been possible without the lovely apple pencil.
I’ve really got to learn to stick to my intention of doing a rough style when I set out to do so though. If I do this again I must try harder to leave things alone once I’ve done them. I’ll show you another few process stages later on…
-cvj
