P R O T E C T O R is alive !

Okay, so, Protector finally got announced last Friday, and after a few days of comatose state, I'm here to bring you a bit more of Protector goodness!

(Also, I went through all Protector-related posts here and created a new tag for your convenience.  You could take a trip down the memory lane of the last two years along with me now!)

Anyway, the whole history of how this book came to be is VERY long and quite twisty, but the short version of it is:

1) Good Simon Roy approached me with the rough story and some layouts and character designs in 2015/2016. I loved it immediately! We decided to pitch it to Image. Our brother Jason Wordie agreed to color the thing.

2) We pitched it to Image twice with some updates (first time it was around 10 pages, second time - the entire #1). After first attempt I got busy with Turncoat for a while. During second attempt, I was beginning my work on The 7 Deadly Sins - and so, when the book was finally greenlit, I was too busy to actually work on it!

3) Anyway, the whole thing took almost 4 years of incidental work, but now all 5 issues of it are actually done (in inks). After completing issues 2 and 3 I realized that the time gap between those and our first issue is too noticeable, and took some time to redraw #1. It was chronicles here partially, but for now let's look at the journey of our very first page of this book in details!

So, first, we have layouts from Simon. He did breakdowns for, hmmm, about 40% of the book? Sometimes I stuck pretty close to his layouts, especially in the beginning. Other times I wandered off or did layouts by myself. It felt very organic in any case, and helped me with many complicated scenes and set pieces.

Next, my pencils. Nothing out of ordinary for Artyom from 2015/2016  or Artyom from 2019.

Then - inks! I inked most of the pitch pages with brushes, and it might be the main reason why I decided to redraw so many parts of #1 later.

Also, this will be a little sidestep, but later SImon found those pencils from the period when he was planning to draw  the book himself. Seeing it next to my page was a bit eerie - like looking into a portal to another reality.

Finally - grey tones! I did quite a lot of these on every page from that period before passing my pages to Jason for coloring. We ended up tuning down a lot of this rendering in the final version of the issue (even on the pages that had the minimal amount of edits).

Aaaand colors! I've always loved Jason's work, but I'm still glad that we had those 3 years to come up with the exact right amount of flat coloring, textures and rendering.

WHOOSH! Now we're in 2019!!! Groovy!!!

Look at this. You could almost FEEL the heat! So good and crisp <3

And finally, some of Hassan's brilliant lettering for you (before we publish proper preview for the issue). 

Even the dialogues were edited as the years passed!

Aaaaand that's it for today. But we have so much materials to show!