The Sacrificers #11 Big Preview

A step-by-step with pencils, inks, washes and colors.

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

If you missed last week’s edition, make sure you go take a look at the whackiest commission I’ve ever done.

This week I spent most of the time working on three covers. One for a new book called Skin Police, written by my pal Jordan Thomas, and the other two are a double cover for GI Joe - a first for me! Here’s a detail I was particularly proud from the Skin Police cover:

With these done I worked on other tidbits, including finishing the bookend maps for Phenomena Book 3 with Brian Bendis. These are always a lot of fun, because we did the three of them after each book was done, which allowed us to create something truly encompassing of the whole narrative.

Now, this week’s main dish:

The Sacrificers #11 preview

Issue 11 of The Sacrificers is coming fast, which means we have a preview making the rounds.

Naturally, it only makes sense to take a detailed look at the pages from the preview, with all the steps I did for it (digital pencils, unadjusted raw ink scans and digital washes) plus colors by the great Dave McCaig. I’ll be showing pages 1-3 because showing 4 steps of 4 images would be too much for the size of this newsletter. Also, the 4th one doesn’t add anything new in terms of the technique, being a continuation of the scene with mostly small panels of dialog.

So what you’ll see below are the first three pages of issue 11, which have some pretty heavy design work going on. Both the location(s) and the rock people did not exist and are all brand new creations. I tried to extrapolate as much as possible from what Max had done before, hoping to leave him with something he’ll have fun with.

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Pencils were drawn on Clip Studio Paint, on an iPad Pro, using the default pencil of the software (I quite like it). Inks were done with Saji and Maru Tachikawa nibs with Pilot ink and Pilot Hi-Tec pen for the straight lines, all on 220 g/m2 paper. Then, after scanning and adjusting everything, I go back to Clip Studio for the washes, this time using a watercolor DAUB brush. Then Dave uses my PSD layered file with inks and washes to work his magic.

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See you next week folks,

André