New Transformers Cover (step by step)

Plus new Phenomena pencils and a great recommendation

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

Before anything else, let me recover last week’s edition for those who missed it: Phenomena Book 2 is a real object, will be out in April 23 and you can preorder it right now. You know how it goes, this will get repeated a few times over the following weeks.

Also in last week’s edition I showed a couple of new covers and said there were many more to come. Well, here’s another one:

Transformers Cover

This is an important one for me.

I’m not very nostalgic nor sentimental, but when I was a little kid (around 5 years old), the Transformers cartoons were one of my favorite things on the planet.

Also, at the very same age, my grandfather on my dad’s side, loved to ask me what I wanted to do when I’d grow up. This was because 5 years-old me was fairly certain of my future, stating that I was going to be “an artist for Disney”. (Disney, to 5 years-old me, meant a place where I could create stories at the time). This was so specific that my grandfather kept asking it so other people could hear me say it. Everybody thought it was very cute and funny. And that’s why I remember me saying it.

My mind didn’t change as the years piled on and when you consider that I technically did start my career at Disney (my first professional gig was at Marvel) and that I’ve now officially drawn Transformers, the meaning of this cover goes a bit beyond normal. 5 year-old me would enjoy it (in fact, he does enjoy it, he’s still here), but I suspect my grandfather would enjoy it even more. He always LOVED seeing his grandkids doing well, right until the very end.

Here’s the cover itself, with Devastator menacingly standing over Optimus Prime:

The image itself sprung to my mind quite immediately when I read the brief. I quickly translated it to the thumbnail and sent it to the Skybound editorial team, which they loved:

My concern was to get the proportions right, which according to my research (looking at toys online side by side and at charts created by fans - very scientific) and the editorial team, was indeed correct. I penciled it digitally, leaving a lot of the black smoke behind the towering Devastator to be solved at the inking stage.

I used a brush to ink all the smoke and a nib for the hatching - hence why I decided to post here a raw scan of the piece for you to see.

I was going for a dry brush approach instead of hatching, but the bits where it would be applied were a little too small for it to work like that.

For reasons unknown to me, the main reference I used for the Devastator had the wrong Transformers logo. Not being a specialist in Transformers lore, I thought it was like that on this character and drew it like you can see above. But the nice editors that this book has kindly pointed the mistake to me, which I corrected for the final version. Apparently Hasbro is pretty cool with artistic differences (meaning you don’t need to go crazy with details and have some freedom to draw the characters) but they ask for the logos to be the right ones, which is only fair.

I did not do the tones you can see on the thumbnail, because it felt to me they’d be redundant since the image was to be colored and most of the lighting was indicated already in ink.

Below you can see the final image minus the logo and credits, with just the lovely colors by Chris O’Halloran:

Phenomena final pages

On the Phenomena side of things, most of this week was spent doing thumbnails and penciling the final 13 pages. I have 8 done, 5 to go. Early next week I’ll be already inking these lovely final moments of Book 3.

Also this week, I inked cover 3 of 4 for something that I love very much and that I can’t wait to show you.

I’ll tell you this, I never drew so many covers in my life - and I already have 4 more lined up for the next few months. Not complaining though, I always wanted to draw more covers, so I’m enjoying every second.

Recommendation

This fantastic Frank Quitely video was making the rounds last week and I had to share it here. It’s a short but fantastic talk about three things that can only be done in comics:

The three things Frank enumerate can be, in all honesty, be summed up in one: time representation. The peculiar combination of representing motion with still images plus the agency readers have in making the story move forward allows for comics to be absolutely unique in the way it plays with time. You can slowly look at things that are happening very fast or glance over multiple panels at once, breaking the linearity a narrative traditionally has, etc.

Food for thought. Comics can be endlessly fascinating.

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See you next week!

André