Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Turtle Process

Here you get to see a page in production from beginning to end. This is a page from the upcoming TMNT #14 which I am woking on with Ric Remender. Since Ric was pressed for time due to his schedule, there are a few pages I am doing more finished art on.

First we start with Ric's layout, which was draw by him in marker, scanned into his computer and printed out in non-repro blue ink full comic size at 10 X 15 and printed on 2 ply Bristol, smooth surface paper ( which I darkend here to show you the viewer better) and Fedexed to me along with the rest of the pages.


Next I went in after reviewing the plot which Ric included and tightened up the page, also looking at the other pages Ric had sent for the issue. I did a quick Google search with my laptop which sits on my drawing table right in front of me, and found a baboon baby pic for ref for the baby on this page.



Next I go straight in on the inks. I don't pencil that tight for myself, just enough to get the structure down, I want to keep the inking stage "active' and do a lot of my drawing while I ink. I inked with pen first, a Hunt 103, and then went in with a brush, a Langnickle #3 sable



Then it's pretty much straight forward from here, I finish the details in pen and then go in with the brush and fill my blacks, also going over certain lines I initially put down with a pen and BOLD them up to help pull a form forward, or seperate it from the background, etc. I do all the Kirby Krackles with a Speedball lettering pen, a B-6 I think...I look for tangents and to make sure the background and figures read well against each other. Once I am satisfied I erase the page and scan it in to my Mac and clean it up in Photoshop. It's there I add the stars...and I'm done!

2 comments:

Lord Nightwalker said...

Man, that's cool. Thanks for sharing Mike! When I heard your name associated with TMNT a while back, my first thought was, the one who worked on Batman?! COOL!
It's good to know your still keeping busy. Take care man.

Khang Le said...

Thank you for the precise process Mike. Awesome tutorial!