A new project?

Well, kinda... Not really, but... yes?

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

As this week’s title implies, I’ve worked on something slightly different for the last couple of days. My mother, besides her regular work, also writes. And before I begun working professionally, she wrote two children’s book for which I provided the illustrations. She then wrote a third one, when I was working on Avengers AI, for which I drew a lot of pieces but that in the end she didn’t publish for a variety of reasons.

She will put it out now and asked me to add a couple of drawings and a cover. And when your mom asks, you better do it. So we can say that in a way, it is a new project…but not really… kinda?

But first, Phenomena!

This week I completed yet another 6 pages - two singles and two spreads, as we introduce another massive location. That brings our total of Book 3 to 52 finished pages. That’s fully finished artwork, grey tones and all. You can see here below a sneak peek of our characters heading into the new place, in what is pretty much one of my favorite pages from the book. It is a fun challenge to provide depth in a dense forest while maintaining a balanced composition and good readability.

Mom’s book

As I said above, my mother and I worked on a trilogy of children’s books 10 (ten!) years ago. After the first two were published, the third one was mostly finished but for various reasons she didn’t publish it then. As it would be a shame to have something nearly done simply go unpublished forever, she decided to tweak it and asked me to draw a couple of extra pieces and a cover. As Brian writes the next bit of script, I had a couple of days to dedicate to it and wrapped all pencils and inks for it.

The plot involves a group talking animals that takes place in our hometown. Naturally, the animals stop thieves from ruining a big local celebration and save the day. It was a nice change of subject for me to dive into.

Admittedly, it is a bit weird getting back to something I did 10 years ago to complete it, but I tried to mimic the techniques as well as possible to make everything fit together. However, a decade is a decade - to the trained eye, there will be some noticeable differences between drawings. The thought of redrawing everything popped into my mind, though the lack of time made me quickly abandon it.

This is drawn in a much simpler style than usual, with less rendering, which helps to hide the evolution in style. Which all in all, made for some acceptable results in the end:

For the cover, I allowed myself to render things a bit more and bring it closer to my usual work:

I’ll have to eventually color everything in the near future. Luckily for me, all the old drawings have flat colors done, which will help speed things up.

New sketchbook

I’d say that, in the last few years, 99.9% of my drawing output has been work related (pages, designs, thumbnails etc), with very, very little time gone into sketching. Kids + work meant some things had to give and sketching, simply for the sake of sketching, was one of those things. But now, with the kids at school, I want to pick that habit up again. Mostly to try techniques and tools that might help to improve the quality of my drawings.

And with that in mind, I bought a couple of sketchbooks. I wanted something simple but with decent enough paper that could hold some ink as well some size. So I bought two (one A4 and another A5) with 140g paper and I plan to fill them in following months.

My main current concern about my work is to tighten the way I draw faces. Naturally, that’s where I aimed my sketching first. I’ve begun drawing all kinds of people from all kinds of angles on the smaller sketchbook, doing some lose pencils but tight inks. The idea is to give faces an extra tiny bit of attention to tighten the proportions.

Looking at the sketchbook, I toyed with the idea of filling it with nothing but faces, but it might be too much. We’ll see. For now, I’ve done these:

Looking forward to many more of these.

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See you all next week!

André