topo fruna♡~!

morpho books

figure drawing for all it's worth (+ creative illustration)

framed ink

will eisner comics and sequential art

will eisner graphic storytelling and visual narrative

understanding comics (+ making comics)

folder of various animation production art

burne hogarth drawing dynamic hands

perspective for comic book artists

michael mattesi force drawing

the animator's survival kit

color and light james gurney

"I prefer a little bite to my adventures."

officially subscribing to the theory that jax wrote one more suggestion.

[Image description: Comic of Jax and Pomni, set during “The Amazing Digital Circus” episode 5’s Stargazing adventure. Alt text is provided and copied below the cut. End ID]

Here's a sample I used for the Lackadaisy Essentials art book. About 98% of the time, I'm not using specialized brushes - just basic soft and hard-round brushes, with various opacities.

Digital scan of the establishing shot pencil drawing - I added some some grid lines on top to double check the 1-point perspective. I didn’t include the characters here because I knew I’d be using the art as a background for more than one panel in the comic.

Initial lighting pass - This was done almost entirely by burning shadow directly into the pencil art scan. This way, I preserve a lot of my pencil lines (rather than painting over them) and the grain of the paper remains in play. This helps retain a sort of aged, natural media look despite the largely digital nature of it.

Contrast and brightness adjustments - Here I hand-painted more minute details into the rug, decor and fixtures with small diameter round brushes. I drew a wallpaper pattern on a separate canvas, then applied it as an overlay layer here too. And, of course, the characters arrived as raw pencils on new layers.

Character compositing and color wash - I didn't want to go fully monochrome with the colors, but I also didn't want to treat this like a full color digital painting. Instead, I opted for something resembling a warm-to- cool wash, achieved with a color layer on top of the grayscale base. Young Mordecai and Rose were toned to match the scene with a combination of burning, dodging and painting.

Lighting effects and atmosphere - Overlay layers can be used to push warm values into a much more saturated, vibrant place than a color layer alone can manage, and that's what I did here to create the streaming sunlight. I used a screen layer to include overexposure on bright colored elements as well. Floating dust motes in the light were added for atmosphere, and I polished the characters up with their own color and overlay layers to match the scene.

I only realised when I saw this frame that Mordecai wears a detachable collar

The 1920s were the decade men began to shift to attached collars which are the norm today (see video below at 9:37). Though they where still available, especially by the end of the decade, it was generally only older men or the wealthiest who would be seen wearing them

Its interesting Mordecai chooses the more conservative fashion despite being 28 at the time of the main comic which occurs in 1927.

Could be a nod to his more formal buttoned down nature

Or it could be because, when he first arrived in St Louis, Atlas provided him with his own second hand clothes, and as an older man his shirts were likely this style

So thats what Mordecai got accustomed too, even when Mitzi arranged for new ones that actually fit his slimmer build

Or maybe he just finds it easier for laundering blood stains to be able to change the collar and not the whole shirt ;)

Also worth noting that Mordecai's dapper fashion sense does not stick entirely to the older school, as his trousers are much slimmer in "Inegnue" set in 1921, six years earlier than the main series in 1927, where the pilot episode shows he has started wearing much wider ones

This reflects another trend in the middle of the decade where trousers began to shift from the slender "drainpipe" style of the Victorian/Edwardian era and began expanding , a trend started by rebellious students at Oxford University with "Oxford Bags", though most (and certainly Mr Heller) avoided the more extreme bagginess of many of those

As well as being wider this was when they began to introduce pleats to provide more room for the thighs

Mordecai seems to have been on top of this fairly new fashion trend fairly early, including it in the matching suits for himself and Viktor for the 1926 New Years party

It is always interesting to note these fun details in the evolution of mens fashion in any history inspired series, expecially one set in the dapper 1920s!