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.

CENTURY RETURNS!!!

Been a while since I posted anything but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy busy busy.

*Century: Night of the Silhouette is now complete.

*I've discovered www.createspace.com and am happy with a proof copy they've produced for me. Should be able to sell copies within a month.

*I've completed coloring the first issue of Century: Journey to the Immortal City but am no longer going to be releasing individual issues due to it not being cost effective.

*I set up a Deviantart page. www.greg-caron.deviantart.com/

Hopefully I'll be able to post here more frequently now. I'm currently finalizing the script to Journey to the Immortal City #2 and should be drawing within a week.

New ideas are in motion.

No one wants to buy print comics online due to the plethora of free online digital comics. That kind of squashes my get rich quick scheme. So with so many comics online, how do I get ahead of the other guy? Motion comics on youtube is how. Once this first volume is completely revised and assembled as a trade paperback, I am going to work on adapting it into a motion comic. Hopefully I can include a link to where to purchase the book and maybe make a little cash while I'm at it. I love it when a plan comes together.

Aggressive Expansion

I still haven't finished lettering issue #5, but kind of was in the mood to work on the revisions to Issue #1. At a bit of a decision point. There is a different aspect ration between 1-3 and 4-5. So I'm wondering if I should expand the panels to be uniform, or just hope that no one notices the difference when I put them together in the collected volume.

Scanning Continues

Took me a while, but I finally scanned in a painting of mine with the wand scanner. Unfortunately it is such a long and time consuming process to piece it together in photoshop that I don't see how I'm going to do the step by step shots of the painting in process. I'll give it a shot, but I may end up having to just take step by step shots with my camera.

Technolomogy

Bought a wand scanner today. I'm going to be making the painted cover soon for the TPB soon and needed a scanner capable of doing a larger size scan job. Unfortunately the scanner seems to warp the image and is making it nearly impossible to photoshop together. I don't know where this mythical wand scanner that they have at Fed Ex Office (formerly Kinkos) is. That is what everyone tells me to use except for the staff at Fed Ex Office who have no idea what I'm talking about and say their large format scanner is something you have to feed paper through and would not work with canvas board. I had hoped to do a step by step scan of the image, but this thing's just not working for me.

Coloring Complete!!!

Been bogged down with work and haven't had much time to color over the past month, but it's complete now. Now to make the bubbles & letter it.

INNOVATION!!!

Found our that the Stamp filter in Photoshop does a damn good job at eliminating individual pixels that I previously had to go one by one coloring in. You have no idea how much time this will save me.

Inking complete!!!

Finished inking NOS #5. Work's been getting in the way of my comic work, so I hopefully can have Issue 5 finished before 2011.

The next step is to redo the other issues. I hate to say it, but I feel like Issue 3 may get a slight overhaul as well. Not sure if I'll ever be able to put the brush down. I'm also not sure if I should preserve the original sketch pages for the issues I'm redoing. I think there's no point in being sentimental about them and frankly the inked versions of those are useless to me now, so I guess they'll be enough for the "Century Museum". The more I look at them though, the more I feel like every single panel is going to be drastically redrawn. It's becoming very clear that I won't have the trade paperback ready before 2011.

This is the end

The sketches for the final issue of Night of the Silhouette have been completed. It's the beginning of the end. There's still along road ahead. Inking and coloring will take a while and I have to figure out my printing situation, but completing the illustrations is a big personal milestone for me. My new years resolution was to finish this volume and it looks like I'm on track to do just that. I'd love to up the ante and get Volumes 2 & 3 done in 2011, but that'd be a lot of work to fit in around the crappy job I must do for money.

Procrastination: The Adventure Continues

The end of September and most of October was pretty rough, so I unfortunately did not complete sketching Night of the Silhouette #5. I am down to 5 1/2 pages to go on it, then ink and color and blabbity bloo blah. Fortunately this productivity breakdown lasted much shorter than the one in the middle of issue 3 and I've been cranking through pages at a slow, but steady pace. With any luck the sketches will be done by the end of the week. Then probably another two weeks until it's completely finished. As much as I'd like to feel good that the first volume is complete, I still have my overhaul of 1 & 2 to do. I believe I could get that wrapped up before the year is over though. One thing I'm considering is actually adding in 4 pages of content to Issue 1 and giving the story a little breathing room. There are a few rushed scenes. Not sure if I'll add anything to 2. At 20 pages, it's the shortest issue. Still a while before I get to that phase, so I don't have to make up my mind tonight.

MORE MORE MORE!!!

I haven't sent the files for Issue #4 to Comixpress yet and I'm starting to consider adding in a new scene. I have a scene break between pages 14 and 15 where I could seamlessly insert it. The point of the scene in question is to get a "good enough" answer to a big unresolved scene that gets played out properly in Volume 2. Furthermore it would be a "Nemeses meet" moment and would kind of bridge where a character is left off on page 14 and where we meet them again on page 22 better. It just feels like if I don't go on to Volume 2, this will make it feel more complete. I don't know, I'll mull this over a little while longer.

COVER!!!

I don't want to post just the raw sketch, but I just completed the sketch of the cover for the trade paperback of Volume 1. For the most part, the layout is very inspired by Drew Struzan style movie posters but there's a centerpiece to it that's very original and perfectly captures the major character arc in a really unique way. Unlike the other covers however, this one will be painted. I'm planning on taking step by step pictures of the painting as it progresses. It's not going to be much in the way of a tutorial, but it will be a pretty cool look as the image evolves. I really hope the painting comes out as good as the sketch.

Backwards thinking

I got anxious to draw the final page again for Issue #5 and while on a roll, just kept going backwards. Kind of a weird way to draw and not necessarily the smartest. Some establishing shots had to be redrawn because I didn't know "oh, this is the first time we see that." It would help a lot of I scripted it properly, but really I just did a bare bones "so and so holds a knife" type descriptions, because being the the writer and illustrator, there's no miscommunication. Anyway, halfway through Issue 5. Perhaps the final comic I make? We'll see, kiddies. We'll see.