Righteous Thirst Deluxe Copies

Dozens of copies with me + New Phenomena inks

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

For those unaware, authors get complimentary copies (known as comps) of the books they make sent by the publisher. The numbers will vary depending on the publisher and the nature of the job, but even on variant covers I get a few copies featuring my work.

Because I live in Portugal, comps coming from the US sometimes get lost, forgotten, stuck, etc. One of those things happened with my comps for A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance Deluxe Edition. But the fine folks at Image manage to track them down and nudge them on my direction.

And a couple of weeks ago, they arrived.

Many Deluxe Editions

We received all three editions with our Deluxe comps: the regular one, the DCBS variant and the elusive San Diego Comic Con exclusive wraparound cover:

Most of my copies are from the regular edition (seen above in the middle) but I still have a few copies of each of the other two.

Since it can be hard to track, I’ve been selling some to readers. A couple of them to Portugal and another one to Singapore. This last one had a commission inside (check this Instagram video), which gives the book another value:

If any of you dear Castrum Lusitania readers wants something like the image above, get in touch here.

Phenomena Inks

It was lovely to focus most of this week on inks. As I said last week, this current batch of pages is a particularly important part of the book, so it feels amazing to be fleshing it out and seeing it come to life. Most of it is dialogue, so it’s all about caring for the subtle acting, the facial expressions, the body language and leaving room for balloons.

Here you can see a big chunk of one of my favorite pages so far (that I showed last week in pencils form - now fully inked):

And here below are a few panels in different stages of inking. This is because I’m leaving some fine details for a later pass in some cases and some big blocks of black in other cases.

Finally, a bit of a spread that I filmed for Instagram as well. A pity that I can add videos to the newsletter, otherwise I would.

Feature on characterdesignreferences.com

If you’re like me and search constantly for images to use as references, you might have heard of characterdesignreferences.com - a great website with collections of many artists. I have visited it often and saved many image libraries directly from there. So it was a very nice surprise to find my work collected there as well: https://characterdesignreferences.com/artist-of-the-week-10/andre-lima-araujo

It’s one of those full circle moments we sometimes are lucky enough to go through.

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I still have a bunch of things to do this weekend, some of which you’ll see next week. Others you won’t, because that’s the nature of the game sometimes. Work will then inevitably merge both weeks, but it’s for a good cause.

Among the ones you’ll see are more inks, illustrations for a children’s book and more sketchbook pages. The others which I can’t show you for now are a cover and new story treatment.

And speaking of covers, this is the fourth one done in the last couple of months that haven’t been shown anywhere yet! Can’t wait to show the step-by-step of some of these.

Back to work it is, see you soon!

André