New cover revealed

Plus a rare original sale.

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

This week was a lot of fun to work through. There were pages inked, files scanned, adjusted, flatted, a brand new (still secret) cover done, another cover I did a few months ago revealed and a very old cover (from 2014) sold.

Let’s dive in!

On my desk

After finishing the inks I showed you a sneak peek of last week, I worked on the other stuff I mentioned above and I am now book ending the week with the same pages I inked, but working on gray tones.

I’ll leave you with just a taste of a very nice spread I’m working on. Just the flats so far, but all the basic tones are set. This is a screen shot of my iPad, where you can see how I split the screen for tones: 1/3 is for the thumbnails, which I use as reference since all the tones are planned there, and 2/3 are for Clip Studio, where all the final work takes place.

New cover reveal

Now the headline. A few months ago you might remember me talking about working on three covers during August and even showing you a detail of one of them. That very same cover was revealed this week:

It’s a variant cover for the final issue of A HAUNTED GIRL, a passion project by Ethan Saks with his daughter Naomi Sacks and Marco Lorenzana. Colors here were by the great Chris O’Halloran (who else). The book is fascinating because it talks about how the chosen one destined to save the world is a teenage girl who also happens to be depressed.

This was heavily inspired by real life, as Naomi went through depression herself. Both she and her father Ethan used their personal journey through mental health to feed a fantastic story, giving this comic a special meaning and weight.

I’ve worked with Ethan on one of my favorite Marvel projects (Silver Surfer Annual) and we remained friends ever since. It was a pleasure to do something again for him, particularly on such a special project.

Here’s my original line art. I went with very simple but effective tones. Highlight the corridor and lead our eyes to the… eyes:

Rare original art sale

I don’t sell a lot of original art, but a collector came around a couple of weeks ago and convinced me to part ways with an old Marvel cover. This was a cover for Ultimate FF, a very short lived series (it only lasted 6 issues and I drew 4-6). Turns out he was a massive fan of the book, which was both unexpected and rewarding. As with everything I do, I did my very best on that book, despite it being pretty much cancelled even before I got started, so it’s always nice to discovered it connected with someone in a level deep enough to make them seek originals and get in touch.

The cover was, frankly speaking, insane. It feature animal versions of some Marvel characters from an alternate dimension that would appear in a brief scene of the book. See it for yourself because words do not make it justice:

Yes, that’s Galactypus.

My original idea was an homage to one of Moebius’ Silver Surfer covers:

Thankfully, because I sold a few complete issues from my Marvel work this year, I had everything with me and I kept it all in chronological order (kinda), so it was easy to track this one down. Below you can see some photos I took of the original piece. Both a general view and some details. This is from 2014, but the rendering technique is pretty similar to today’s:

I did a quick Instagram reel showing the packaging:

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Beginning a new cover series

Good news: Substack is allowing videos.

Bad news: Substack is allowing videos.

I’m working on a new series of covers for a thing I really, really like and this week I completed the first one. So I’m showing an unedited clip of me drawing tiles for it (where you can hear the F1 podcast I was listening to):

The clip was one of a few that I put together on a reel:

andrelimaaraujo

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MERRY CHRISTMAS

There won’t be a Castrum Lusitania edition next week, so allow me to wish you all a Merry Christmas! Or happy holidays if you’re doing something else, like Festivus. Or simply enjoy yourselves if you’re not doing anything. You do you, let others do the same and everything will be wonderful.

Whatever the case, buy comics to give as presents.

This is all for this week, see you soon!

André