One of my good friends asked a favour of me (I don’t do favours for evil friends), and that was to recreate this poster celebrating the development of solar energy – it could not be bought or found in high resolution anywhere:
Of course he wanted it imbued with a little bit of something new too! So I whipped up this:
And here it is in its workprint form:
In a perfect world, I’d be able to print out the workprint version on a huge piece of paper shaped exactly like it.
Sadly, that is not the world we live in. The original poster is made by General Dynamics, a defence contractor for the US. The phrase “atoms for peace” came from a speech by D. Eisenhower, intended to soften the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a way of telling everybody that it wouldn’t be happening again any time soon.
Convinced?
Working on Comics
About three weeks ago I put up a teaser for a little comic I was working on, which I’m now working on the fourth page of (if it’s any excuse, they’re fairly intricate, and I am a busy man these days). I’ve never really done this before, so I’ve had to figure out a process to make it easy for myself. I’ll be showing the first four pages of story as soon as I’ve got this one done, so if you want to save it until then, stop reading!
So where to even start? First, I do a little postage sized sketch of the page as I’d like it to be composed and pull the most basic symbols around. Then I sort of zoom in and start working on a more intricate sketch, until I end up with something that looks like this:
As you can see, there’s still a lot of unfinished, or unclear details that will hopefully get cleared/cleaned up when I do the final colouring. This is all done with a computer, using Alias’ Sketchbook Pro, which works very naturally with the cintiq that I’ve been lucky enough to use for the last few weeks (a cintiq is a screen that you can draw directly onto… amazing stuff).
Usually these take me about two days to do, and two days, nowadays, are hard to come by! But I’ve had a few other ideas in between this, and then had to shun them – because I’ve started this and now I have to do it properly! Otherwise I’ll never have a finished story to show anybody. I’ll do the colouring for this tomorrow and then show everybody what I’ve got so far. Basically making it up as I go along – and that, for me, is one of the best ways to work.