deadwinter

Art Journal 009: Writing Part 1: Characters

 Last week I wrote a bit about how I handled writing dialogue and how it relates to my artwork, so this week I’d like to follow up on that topic and share a bit about my process for writing stories. It’s an area where I have less technical training than I do in the drawing aspect of comics but it’s something I’ve been doing pretty consistently for the past seven and a half years so as someone who started out as Not A Writer I think it would be interesting to put my thoughts down int...

Art Journal 008: Speech

Comics aren’t unlike written stories.  We substitute a lot of the descriptive text- the words outside the quotation marks- with our art, which illustrates the world and the things that happen in it.  But we’re humans, we’re social creatures.  We communicate a great deal with one another, and it’s through this communication where the soul of a story unfolds.  We yell and we shout, we think and we whisper, we bellow, we laugh, we growl.  The way in which w...

Art Journal 007b: Palette

Here's my old palette file I used when I laid out different flat tones for different areas. I'd put two on my Photoshop paintbrush at a time- one foreground and one background- and hit X to cycle back and forth. I'd go through my whole page putting each pair of colors were they needed to go, do the next pair and repeat until I was done. Tone 1 was basic caucasian skin tone, blonde hair and any white shirts anyone might be wearing, including Alice's nurse hoodie. Tone 2 was for darker things like...

Art Journal 007: Modeling

Characters are the beating heart of my stories.  They’re the people whose lives we follow, whose pasts we see passing impressions of and whose futures are ultimately tied up in one anothers’ hands. In addition to being the narrative focus they also serve as a visual anchor, guiding the story and the reader’s focus from panel to panel.  And since characters are so important to the comic as a whole it goes to show that they receive a greater deal of artistic attention to h...

Art Journal 006: Inking

Inking isn’t really what my art is known for but it’s nonetheless an integral part of my comic-making process.  I’m a painter at heart and over the years I’ve experimented with different ways of inking my comics so the subjects pop and the process is that little bit quicker to finish.  I do most of my inking digitally; I keep a sketchbook I do pen drawings in when I am out and about so I can practice and keep in form but the bulk of my professional work is done on a co...

Art Journal 005: Character Design

This week’s journal is going to explore the ways I like to design characters for upcoming or current arcs in the comic, which means there might be some minor plot spoilers here.  I won’t spoil anything major, and if I do (since I can’t spoiler tag a Patreon post) I’ll convert the spoiler sentence into binary and paste that here, so if you want to read the spoiler you can just run the numbers through a binary translator (like this one, for example 2014-06-13 07:01:47 +0000 UTC View Post

Art Journal 004: Backgrounds

This week’s journal post is going to be a bit more visual-oriented than the others.  I’ve been choosing what to talk about based on what state my comic happens to be in every Thursday- assuming I haven’t been working on other non-NDA projects that week too- and this Thursday I happened to be working on backgrounds, the underappreciated underdog of underground comics.

The presence of a background from one scene to the next serves to give the characters in a sequential na...

Art Journal 003: Cameras

One of my favorite parts of planning a comic, and one of the most meticulous and time-consuming for me to actually do, is work the camera.  All of my comics start out as a visual narrative in my head, like a private cinema that only I can see, and it plays over and over again, changing slightly each time as I make edits and work out how a sequence of events might flow.  The camera represents the reader’s window into your world, and when I consider how a scene plays out I am ...

Developer's Log 002: Player Controls

In the last update we talked about the foundation of how the games will build missions for players to challenge, so this week we're going to talk about how the player will actually be able to challenge those missions. Player controls are absolutely vital to a game being successful- anyone growing up with game rentals can attest to how deeply a game with poor controls can ruin the entire experience, or how in the right hands it can define it. We're working in the vein of classic arcade cabinets (...

Art Journal 002: Animation & Comics

Animation is a very powerful artistic tool, being able to create the illusion of life from shifting shapes opens a door to a universe of possibility: you're not bound by actors, props, location, time, weight, space or anything; you're creating it all and you can create anything your imagination can conjure, and people can see it come to life right before their eyes! On the other hand, not being bound by any sort of limitations means it's very easy to get lost in that vast universe, to g...

Developer's Log 001: The Master Plan

I've been thinking about making a video game for probably as long as I've been making my comic. When I first started Dead Winter I always thought of the characters in terms of what stats or abilities they might have in a tabletop RPG setting. I never had a comic shop near me growing up so I never got to read too many comic books, but we had a video store up the street and we rented a -lot- of video games, so playing and studying how games click together and flow has definitely shaped a big part ...

Art Journal 001b: The Thumbnails

Here's a quick look at my thumbnail process both for this page and a couple previous pages. Thumbnails are very basic, just block in my frames and where the figures are positioned visually with maybe a blurb about what the speech in that panel should be about. The sketch phase doesn't always adhere directly with the thumbnail, its more an idea to give me direction in composing a page than a set-in-stone guideline. The current page sticks pretty close to the plan but previous pages have deviated ...

Art Journal 001: The Sketch Phase

Over the years I've developed an evolving multi-step process to making comics that has proven very useful in organizing and producing my pages. In order the phases are 1) Thumbnails, 2) Sketches, 3) Inks, 4) Flats, 5) Tone Foregrounds, 6) Lettering & Word Balloons, 7) Paint Backgrounds. This week's weekly update landed on the Sketch phase so I'm going to talk a little about that. The sketch phase is probably the single most important phase of the entire comic. This is where I take my thumbna...