Now, speaking of El Diablo, today's art post is a scan from issue five of that very book. In looking for something to talk about today, I happened across this page in my studio, and thought it might have something to offer.
My art partner, Phil Hester, and I have been playing with negative effects in our work for several years now. We both like to fill the page with blacks, so I guess this was the natural end result. It became part of our style on on Marvel book, Ant-Man. Phil would indicate where he wanted this effect, and leave the method to me.
I quickly decided the the simplest way to accomplish what Phil was after was the Invert command in Photoshop. Yeah, making the selections is a hassle, and you have to occasionally add some lines to make things clear, but it beats doing it any other way... by a long shot.
Today's scan was a particularly labor-intensive example of this technique. As I mentioned above, making the selection to be inverted took a lot of time, and there was a little tweaking to do afterwards, to be sure the forms weren't getting lost. It took about an hour to do in PS, but it was time well-spent, I think. We got the effect we were after, and I didn't have to go to a copy shop or hold a brush loaded with white-out for hours.
The computer has changed my life in a number of ways in the last several years. I used to have to rush to the Fedex box to ship my pages off to the publishers. No more. Now, I simply scan the page myself and send them off electronically. This process also gives me more control over the finished product. I can tweak and clean up the pages, to be sure the scans are exactly what my penciller and I had in mind. And, of course, when I need a big, old negative effect...
That's enough outta me. Enjoy the genius, and come back for more tomorrow!
Anj
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2 comments:
Hi Anj,
"Yeah, making the selections is a hassle, and you have to occasionally add some lined to make things clear"
Rather than adding a line manually, to define shapes, have you considered adding a stroke to the outside edge of your white selection? It would be uniform, so you might still want to tweak a bit, but it might be cleaner than trying to draw it digitally.
For all I know, that's exactly what you're referring to, but in case you aren't, and it hadn't occurred to you, I thought I'd mention it.
Great job on the inks, by the way!
Best,
Rich
Yeah... that's a great idea. I think I considered it once, but never actually tried it.
I think, just by virtue of how I made the selection on this page, that I got some accidental halo here that worked to my advantage.
Great to see you here!
Anj
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