The journey is complete!

It sure took its sweet time getting here but "CENTURY: Journey to the Immortal City" is complete now. If all goes according to plan, it should be up on Amazon within a month.

Moving Right Along

Issue #4 for Journey to the Immortal City is complete. Really happy with how this one came out. The story has taken the characters quite far from where they were as of the first volume. "Sequel seems to be a dirty word but I think they have a very unique kind of narrative appeal when done right. From my end, it was fun to return to these characters I created and then completely throw them out of their element in a story that very much stands apart from its predecessor. The time jumps that each subsequent volume will take also are going to go a long way towards making each one feel different from one another.

Also this issue represents a milestone for Vol. 2, as it has crossed the 100 page mark.

And another one down

Journey to the Immortal City #3 is complete. It's a little dialogue heavy but I feel it has the best art yet. The issue will probably be quite confusing seeing as the first volume has only sold one copy so far... But you can solve that problem by purchasing CENTURY: NIGHT OF THE SILHOUETTE from here!!!

https://www.createspace.com/3931501

or here!!!

http://www.amazon.com/Century-Night-Silhouette-Volume-1/dp/1478373989

How do I do it?

I don't know how many times I need the world to shut me out when I try to focus on other life pursuits outside of my comics and how many times I tell myself it will be "the last time" but I hope I can finally shut out everything and focus only on Century. I tried to make my life better, and things only got worse. It's almost as if I'm being shown some sort of cosmic sign that I don't belong here.

Century is the only thing that can't be kept from me. If there were a place for me away from it, I don't know if I could ever finish it. Maybe this forced professional failure and forced social solitude is the only reason it exists.

So halfway through May, I got back on track and started drawing again. The pencils and inks are complete on issue #3 of Journey to the Immortal City and I'm currently coloring it. Hopefully I can finish issue #5 before the end of September.

Century: Night of the Silhouette NOW AVAILABLE!

Purchase your copy here

https://www.createspace.com/3931501

or

http://www.amazon.com/Century-Night-Silhouette-Volume-1/dp/1478373989

Preferably the createspace link, as Amazon takes a bigger cut. Help a brutha out.

My Process

Here's my rather rudimentary process of creating a page. It is pretty easy to do if you have photoshop, because remember you can always click help>search in photoshop to find any of its features.

Step 1: Pencil sketch. Pretty self explanatory. I use mechanical pencils so I always have a good fine tip. I illustrate on plain 8.5 x 11 paper rather than double sized bristol board (as is industry standard) due to the nature of how I ink my pages. I will go into that later. Sometimes I do a thumbnail sketch of the panel layouts beforehand. When it comes the putting them on the page, my blank page template has a comic page sized frame. I just simply measure out the panels with a ruler and draw them in.

Step 2: Convert to blue. I open the scanned image in photoshop and convert the color mode to CMYK. You do this by going to Image>Mode. Then in the channels window, I erase everything on the yellow, magenta and black color channels. I don't delete the channels themselves because that screws things up when I convert back to RGB color mode. To ink over this, I have to print it out again, and as I do not have an oversized printer, I have to ink on 8.5 x 11 paper also. That's why I don't bother to do my pencil sketches in double scale, because it would be a nightmare trying to do that level of detail on a smaller scale after the fact.

Step 3: Inking. I use a pretty standard Pilot G-2 gel pen for the most part. It's a kind you can get at any office supply store. For certain details however I do have an super fine point pen, and for the borders, I've started using a thicker one so that they stand out more. Then I just scan it into my computer.

Step 4: Removing the blue. To remove the blue pencil sketch lines from the inked copy, I convert to CMYK again and this time delete the cyan, yellow and magenta channels. It should technically be only cyan, but my printer's not perfect, so some of the other colors are used to produce the blue.

Step 5: Darken the lines. I convert back to RGB mode and go to Image>Adjustments>Exposure and set the gamma correction to 0.01. This gives me an image that is almost entirely pure black and pure white.

Step 6: Coloring. For Century, I only do solid tone colors for the most part. So I just simply use the paint bucket tool in photoshop with the tolerance set to 150, so that there's a little bit of blending along the black lines and they don't look quite so pixelated. It is a bit of a pain because the nature of my inking will result in several single pixels not being colored in, and I'll have to go one by one coloring them in. Any missed lines or gaps, I'll fix with the line or pencil tools. As far as color selection, one big mistake I think I made with Night of the Silhouette was how consistent the colors were. flesh tone outdoors during the day was always the same, or at night, or indoors, or lit by candle or fire light etc. Really it comes across as quite bland. For Journey to the Immortal City, I have a much more chaotic color palette. I try to have things brighter the closer to the panel to add dimension, but really it just goes a long way to make all of the panels stand apart from each other.

Step 7: Lettering. I open the files in Macromedia Flash, because it's the only program I have that does vector graphics. In layman's terms, I can bend lines with my mouse so I can get the bubbles at the right shape and size for the text. Then when that's done, I export the image as a GIF.

Step 8: Final image. I open that file in photoshop once more and fit it to a template I made based on Createspace's printing standards. I export this one as a PDF.

Step 9: Assembly. In the standard picture viewing program on a mac, you can assemble separate pages as a PDF document by opening all the pages, then selecting all but the first one. When they're all selected, you drag and drop them on top of the first page, and voila, they're one document. I have to use a filter that minutely reduces the image quality so that the file size can shrink down below Createspace's maximum, but it's so small the human eye can't tell the difference.

And that there is how I do it. I learned the technique more or less from the appendices in the TPB of Locke & Key: Head Games. Credit where credit is due.

Dear Greg, Go fuck yourself.

Well, got my response from C2E2 about whether I will be getting a table this year and got the old "fuck you" from them. Guess I don't have an April deadline for Journey to the Immortal City anymore.