Back To Work

With a big change in my process

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

I know, I know, this one kinda missed last week but you’ll forgive me for the slightly late status this carries. Getting back to work is challenging enough on its own, but with three kids at home it is even more challenging.

Not complaining though, just dropping some facts to justify that sometimes this will be out slightly out of synch. BUT, with all the turmoil hitting social media these days, it seems to be, more and more, the best place to keep in touch with me and my work, other than my website and email.

Vacations?

There is no such thing with kids, as anyone with as much as one son/daughter will tell you. Well, I have three daughters. The older one is 5 years old and the twins are 2,5. What happens is that you simply cannot remain sit. So you don’t rest. So you don’t really go on vacations. They do and I assume that at the age they are in, that’s the whole point.

They keep growing and things keep changing, all at a very fast pace, so the trick is to enjoy the moments, like the laughs and the kisses and all the hugging, and disregard long term ideas, like reading a book by the pool and not running the the bathroom with one or all of them every 5 minutes over a week. This avoids being frustrated and allows for the good surprises to carry a lot more weight.

Big Change For The Future

So I immediately got back to the usual work routine but the reality is that I didn’t really stop 100% during my week off. That’s because I decided to make a big change on my work process for Phenomena Book 3, which is to give digital pencils a try. With that in mind, I started some trials while on the hotel, when the girls were sleeping. I kinda new what I wanted to go with in terms of layers and tools and process, so everything lined up pretty quickly. My wife (bless her heart) rolled her eyes when she caught me on Clip Studio, but I wanted to come back to work with the digital process sorted out.

The reason for this shift is very simple: time saving. I knew it was going to be faster, but it’s even faster than I thought. I penciled around 20 pages in one week, which is unheard of for me. I usually aim at 10 per week and if I can do more, even better. The biggest gains in speed seem to be coming from things like drawing over my own thumbnails, the ease of making perspective grids, rescaling, etc.

Obviously, this will be the subject of many future newsletters, but you can leave me as many questions as you want on the subject. Take a look at a few new panels in the meanwhile:

They look very clean because I’m drawing over my thumbnails, so I don’t need anything to start going as they are usually tight enough to serve as a first sketch. I do perspective grids on a different layer if needed be and then get rid of it as it is not needed for inking.

And speaking of which, this is all to be printed and inked traditionally.

Righteous Thirst Deluxe

On July 19th, the Deluxe edition of A RIGHTEOUS THIRST FOR VENGEANCE hit the shelves. It’s a stunning edition, absolutely jam packed with extras alongside the entire story. You get the 11 original issues plus dozens of pages with script, thumbnails, pencils, inks, character designs, colors, the whole deal, in an oversized, gorgeous packaged neatly designed by Erika Schnatz. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself:

This last image (which I stole from Twitter) is of the SDCC exclusive dust jacket.

After less than one week, we already had stores reporting to have sold out and having to order more, which pretty outstanding for such a big book and warms our cold hearts.

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The scheduling for the next few weeks is very much packed but it will have a lot of fun things to do: a commission to wrap (finally, hopefully), three covers and lots of Phenomena pages, together with some writing and secret design stuff.

See you all next week. Wait, later this week! Unless, you know, kids.

André