Schedule is building up

The next weeks will be completely cramped

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

This will be a short one given that although this week was very busy, there’s little I can show you. Since last week’s Castrum I’ve worked on a number of different number of things:

• Finished inks for a batch of Phenomena pages - 24 in total

• Scanned and adjusted them

• Began working on grey tones on the 24 pages

• Started doing thumbnails for a short story I’ll be working on soon

• Did a thumbnail for a cover I’ll be drawing next week

• Did a last pass on piece on the making since 2021 (more on this sooner rather than later)

Let’s take a peek at some new Phenomena art then.

Tones

When it comes to adding tones, I’ll always go first with the flat approach (with some light and very select use of gradients for skies, water and other things like that). Once all pages are done I go back and change the flat tones to the old school looking half tones, to give it a more interesting texture. This also allows me to see the finished pages with fresh eyes again and correct/add things.

So what you’ll see now are the flat tones, as I’m still halfway through this batch of 24 pages. I’ll be showing a few panels that you already saw a couple of weeks ago. I think it’s fun to see the progress all the way to the end, in real time with my own schedule.

London Eye

One of my favorites from this section

Spike being Spike

Layouts

The thumbnails work I did for the short story I have lined up were simple layouts, just to break down the story and to translate the bits from the script into paper as I saw them in my head. I already showed you other examples of this and it’s a great way for me to give a very quick pass through a script, no matter how big it is, and get a grasp of what this story looks like pace-wise.

This is for a fantastic creator owned book of some of the best comics creators, so I’m rather excited to be a (small) part of it.

In the making since 2021

Just as a tease, let me tell you that there’s a big illustration I started and kind of finished (but not really) in 2021 that is about to see the light of day in a few weeks. It’s for one of my favorite companies in the world - a great Youtube channel. It was rather complex and it will be the subject of a juicy newsletter soon. We just did the very last adjustments to it this week and I’m very much looking forward to share it with you all.

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Before I wrap it up, please feel free to ask any questions you’d like to see me addressing or any past works you’d like to see more.

See you all soon!

André