Grind Mode On

Getting on with it

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

We’re in grind mode on, folks. As we start to see the end of a massive enterprise that is the Phenomena Trilogy of books, the time is to push relentlessly, not slow down. The temptation to do so creeps in but we must keep it at bay. There are still many weeks of penciling, inking and adding tones to a few dozen pages so this the moment focus and keep the momentum.

The key issue is maintain quality standards from the beginning to very end. You don’t want to look back at something a few years down the line wishing you had put 5% more effort in it.

Stage roulette

The main challenge right now is stage roulette. Script comes in, I read it, do layouts, do pencils, inks, tones, reset. And with shorter batches of script, the jumps between stages of the project can be more demanding because after every few days you move to the another stage. That means that sometimes, when you’re flowing perfectly in one of the stages, you actually need to abruptly stop and move into something else.

It’s important that I clarify that this is not a complaint - this is the nature of the game. But it can get harder towards the end. That’s when the Grind Mode comes in. You might feel tempted to rush through some of the rendering to save some time. Or drop the backgrounds just because you’ve drawn the place a bunch of times.

You mustn’t. Keep it tight. Grind. Discipline.

Future You will thank you.

This Week

To keep the machine going I’ve been jumping between stages quite a lot, so after inking a batch of pages, I did layouts and pencils for another one while the first was being flatted. Once I got the files from the flatter I finished those first pages and now I’m inking again the following one.

In the grey tones department, I’m particularly happy with a few panels that demanded more effects than normal and I wanted to share with you a quick step-by-step.

The inks are quite simple and on its own make things seem to be floating. I usually prefer to rely as much as possible on inks, but with Phenomena this changed a bit in certain parts since I’m doing everything. As you’ll see, the image changes quite a lot once the tones are in place.

The first thing I do, once I have the flats, is assign the right tone of grey to everything:

I added strong lighting to create the drama this bit needs:

Then I did a gradient for the background with some white energy rays - which were done by basically erasing the existing gradient.

The cubes and spheres the character is creating are an important part of the scene, so I felt the cubes needed highlighting since they are superimposed over the character and in the same tone of his clothes.With that in mind, I added a layer on top of the line work (everything else is below) with a white line around the cubes to make it all pop:

The work ends with the usual conversion from flat tones to screen tones:

Also, already seen in previous newsletters, a favorite of mine: Bolden eating a burger:

With all the tones done, I’m currently inking a lovely double spread of yet another big moment in our story:

Recommendations

I’ll just leave you with this great Ridley Scott interview. Napoleon was the topic but Ridley always goes in brilliant tangents. Just like his movies, he’s never boring - even if he barely answers any of the questions.

Always on top form.

See you all next week!

André