The art below is painted by hand in watercolor with touches of ink on Strathmore 500 Multimedia board. The gold areas were painted on the board using 18K gold ink. The lettering is also by hand directly on the board.
The lettering on our names below is by hand, but this was done on a separate board and dropped in via Photoshop. I did it that way in case the editor changed his mind later.
When I work on some comics, sometimes I work with a colorist, but more often than not these days, I do all the art myself as well, including the color.
The final color was done by me on computer in Photoshop.
A lot of people think if you work in mainstream comics, your job is easier because you have a team of people working on each comic. But that’s not necessarily so. I rarely work with other artists now, have not worked with an inker in nearly 20 years, and do my own color as often as possible. It’s more efficient to color your own work than it is to do a lot of tight drawing and rendering in pencil, then pass the art on to an inker, then pass it on to a colorist.
When I color my own work, I know what I can leave to the coloring process and skip in the ink rendering process. As you can see, my inked line art in the above image is very simple. And, of course, for speed’s sake, in a deadline pinch I can use the paint bucket tool to quickly fill in large areas of black, which is a tedious process to do by hand on original art.
However, when working in black and white ink alone, I do a lot of rendering in the ink stage. The below image is by hand using a paste on tone sheet for the effect.
This is from my space opera graphic novel series A Distant Soil. Drawing like this, with all those little lines, is actually more time intensive than doing the same page in full color, because there are a lot of things I can do in Photoshop more quickly than I can do in ink. I would not have done all those little lines to define the form of the horses had I gone straight to color.
Also, doing tones by hand is incredibly tedious work. When I complete A Distant Soil, I will never use them again.
I would rather do fewer books where I have more control over the final art than do many books where I work with a team of people. I like having final say in how my finished art looks.
Have you ever said something to someone you really admired, and then after you said it, regretted speaking entirely? Because that was me, at the 2009 San Diego Comic Con, when I had the great opportunity to meet you in person during your signing as one of the last people getting a signature. Teenage me put my foot in my mouth and said something really weird about dead authors. And when I see your books on my shelf, I tend to cringe at myself about the memory. So I wanted to apologize for saying the really weird thing and only just got the "ah hell, let's do this" courage to actually say it. So, yeah, I'm sorry for being so terribly awkward and making your time potentially discomforting. I was a terribly, terribly awkward odd duck.
I hope you have a lovely day. You're a fantastic person.
I promise that I have the sort of memory that forgets awkward interactions immediately, mostly because I’m trying desperately to make it all not awkward for everyone at the same time they are trying not to say something awkward.
As a helpful tip, if you are in a signing line, don’t worry and don’t overthink. Definitely don’t stand in line rehearsing in your head the brilliant thing you will say when you get to the front. That never works. Best to say thank you, or just tell the person that you enjoy their work.
Two immortal creatures — a vampire and a witch, unbeknownst of each other’s true nature, become married. Waiting for your spouse to die of old age and collect their (waaay above average) inheritance seemed like an easy task, but after 50-60 years things are starting to get… awkward.
