20 penciled pages in one week?
Yes and I'll tell you how.
Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.
Last week I ran here a Phenomena Book 2 Official Preview which I highly recommend you to check if you’ve missed it. You can already preorder the book, which will come out on April 23.
I also alluded to a week of records in terms of penciling, with a promise of talking about it in the next edition of Castrum Lusitania. Which is this one. Welcome to the future.
So let’s talk about it!
20 pages in a week. 9 in a day.
That’s the bottom line of this. 20 in a week. 9 alone in a day. And I worked on other secret things as well. Spent time with my kids. Slept. Went to the gym. Etc.
It’s significant to me because a) it’s the most I’ve ever done in such a short amount of time and b) it shows that I’m still learning the limits of my own pace since I started penciling digitally.
To me, it’s a reminder that despite working professionally for more than a decade, you can still find enormous progress and surprises here and there.
I’ve written already about my switch to digital pencils on previous newsletters so you can reread those if you want a longer explanation about the reasons and the process of how I do it (Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here), but the basic intention was to accelerate the process without losing or changing any of the final results.
I talked about being surprised how much faster it became, with my drawing speed increasing by at least 50% (from around 10-12 pages to 15-17 in a week).
And that coupled with a specific sequence of action led to being able to do even more this time. There was decent amount of backgrounds, complex shots and many characters fighting. But it also had a few rather momentous bits where I chose to highlight just one or two characters with minimal background. Plus most of the 20 pages were spreads with big panels, which means that you’re drawing 2 pages much faster than when they are individual pages.
Finally, the size of the iPad itself helps with the speed. It’s smaller than a piece of paper and I don’t zoom in that much. It’s as if I’m drawing in smaller paper, which is always faster than drawing the same thing in a bigger paper. Nonetheless, I ink it in regular size (important to the idea of keeping the final results as they were when every step was traditional).
See below a few examples of what the pages looked like (though there’s a lot I can’t show at this stage, hence the awkward crops):
As you can see, some panels are pretty full, but the more organic setting is much easier to draw than your given city street (which I’ve done plenty of on Book 2).
All of the work above was all from last week, because this week I’ve been doing a lot of inking. Of the 20, 11 are now inked.
On other news, earlier this week I’ve also penciled three covers (and inked 1) of massive 6 connected covers planned piece that I can’t wait to show you.
However
Despite all this, I still kept things well balanced. Though I work a lot, I drive my kids to school and pick them up with my wife everyday. Go to the gym everyday. Sleep decently enough everyday.
I share all of the above from a process-sharing honest point of view, not from a bragging-look-how-much-I-can-do point of view. The idea of detailing it is that I always loved to hear that from other artists and there’s lots that can be extrapolated from it if you’re a working artist.
Recommendation
I spent most of my inking time this week accompanied by the rather excellent Extras tv show, by Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant. I had seen it years ago, when it came out but I barely remembered any of it.
It’s incredibly funny in a very English way, the same awkward humor they had done in The Office. And in a very BBC/British TV tradition, it’s just two seasons and a Christmas special. You get the very best of an idea and then they wrap it up, which always makes for the best things, the ones that last the longest, the ones that we go back to more often.
Are you having a laugh? IS HE HAVING A LAUGH?!
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See you all next week!
André