Vegas 12: now with 75% more Tessa

Okay, remember how, in my last post, I promised to draw someone other than Tessa? Shortly after I posted, Jeffrey told me to read the next script. It's all about Tessa. Whoops! Well, I didn't really renege on my promise; Jeff is there, too. In the background. That counts, right?

Anyways, I knew I'd have to do this scene for the cover after I heard the preview at the end of Vegas 11. It basically popped into my head, fully-formed, and demanded to be drawn. So I did a sketch and sent it off to be approved.
Then I thought that as long as I had the file sitting there in Photoshop, I should try throwing some color on it to see what sticks. I'm not used to doing dark, dramatically-lighted scenes. And THEN I got all caught up in trying out some new CG painting techniques, and before I knew it I'd decided to digitally paint the cover.

Let's just say it's a good thing I was really ahead when I started, because I am very, very slow with CG work. CG is a double-edged sword; on the plus side, you can fix anything at almost any stage. On the minus side, you can fix almost anything at any stage. So I worked and reworked and re-re-worked it until I realized that I would eventually have to, you know, finish it.

Painting (traditional OR digital) is not my strong suit. I'm not great with color. Fortunately, I found this wonderful tutorial by Julie Dillon that made all the difference. There's some clever stuff there!

The PSD at 100%, along with the giant list of layers.

The final file, sans text and the fun grungy-book effect, was 662 mb. It's 600dpi, which is about as big as I've ever worked. It really helped, too, although it was at the limit of what my newish laptop could do. ;) There are something like 26 layers on it and it took around a minute to save. The maddening thing I discovered about the painting technique was that I couldn't really flatten any of the layers unless I wanted to flatten them down to the background; it would ruin the way the colors blended. Because of this, I ended up working on the Tessa figure in a different file to speed things up a bit.

The floor and door textures in this piece are from cgtextures.com. Big giant thanks to EK and Meghan for critiquing my works-in-progress!

NEXT TIME: I make no promises about next time. I've learned my lesson. I may try to do it in less time, though. This took me about two weeks!

Vegas 11 is now boarding

Hi again! Here's the cover for "Once Upon a Time in Vegas" chapter 11. It was more of a struggle this time, but I think it turned out well in the end. I wasn't intending on doing another Tessa cover, but I thought this scene would work out best. I'll draw someone else next time! Promise!

The cover was colored in Photoshop this time around; I had a time crunch, I still need to replace some markers, and I needed to tweak the drawing a lot. This worked out well because I got to play with the colors a lot more in PS than I'd have been able to with marker. I actually colored everything but Tessa in various grays, and then ended up with the sepia tone after playing around with an adjustment layer. (What's an adjustment layer? Check out this video tutorial to find out.)

I got a kick out of drawing O'Hare, by the way. I know airport gates are generally the same everywhere, but O'Hare is my "home" airport. Thanks, Rene and Alicia, for putting that little detail in. ;)

Once Upon a Time in Vegas #10

Hi everyone! Sorry this is a little late. I was working a convention the weekend this episode came out, and I am just now crawling out from the rock I was hiding under post-con.

This is my first cover for Vegas, although it's not my first Pendant work. I also did the promotional poster for Dixie Stenberg. Both Dixie and this Vegas cover are done in Copic marker on Bristol board.

Anyways! The lovely ladies behind Vegas requested a pulp novel look, which got me really excited. I love vintage art, and pulp novels are no different. I used a lot more blacks and greys than normal in order to emulate the cheap printing method of old pulp novels. This cover also had a lot of Photoshoppin' done to it; some of the markers I was using up and died on me and so I Photoshopped in some of the background. I'm not telling where!

After I finished the main art, I needed to age the cover. Bright clean marker colors aren't very convincing as a 50-year-old book. I used some stock textures and Photoshop brushes to beat up the image a bit.

One more thing I worked on was aging the logo. Paper tends to yellow over time, and inks fade. I putzed around a bit until the logo looked as old and yellow as the rest of the image.

Finally, I dug up a font that had some of the vintage look of pulp novels. The cover uses a slightly tweaked Gill Sans Condensed. I crossed my fingers that Jeffrey wouldn't kill me for being so picky and was done! Here's the end result.

I had a lot of fun working on this cover. I'm looking forward to blabbing about the next one!