Time to wrap 2022

The Last Few Bits

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

I hope all of you had a good Christmas time. Despite three feverish daughters and a broken down car, I can’t complain much as family and friends made up for all the setbacks.

In the last few days of the year I managed to finish all the planned work, almost down to the wire. I finished the batch of pages I had for Phenomena and even got time to do a cover.

Detail from a Phenomena page

More gray tones…

I spent the first half of the week on the iPad, working own gray tones for Phenomena Book 2. My personal goal was to wrap my current batch of pages (all the script I had from Brian) before the end of 2022, which I’m glad to say I managed to do comfortably.

I mean comfortably because I was able to take the Christmas weekend and this New Year weekend off, while reducing the weekly workload slightly without compromising the quality or quantity of production.

As you can see from these images, the gray tones are not flat anymore. Particularly if you compare to the stuff I showed last week. Once everything is in place, I transform the flat grays into small dots (whose density varies according to how dark or light the tone is) to give everything a nice texture. It’s a very cool quick option on Clip Studio Pro.

It reads great on paper and adds a nice touch to it all. It’s also a callback to the old school tones that were used in all the manga books up until the 90s (and that I use on commissions.) Some authors use it even to this day (like one of my favorites, Naoki Urasawa), but they usually have an army of assistants to help them out.

…and a cover.

The second half of the week was spent drawing a cover for a very exciting book, written and drawn by a couple of good friends. It looks fantastic and I’m excited for you all to see it. I can’t show the entire cover but I can show a few sneak peeks:

After a quick rough drawing, I drew a tight perspective grid with three vanishing points. That way, when I start tightening the pencils everything falls easily into place.

This one will be colored, so I left the flat gray tone for Chris O’Halloran (my colorist) to manipulate at his will.

As a side note, I’ve been adding a lot of videos on my Instagram page. Usually the subject is the stuff you get to see here and it’s a shame there’s no direct way for me to include them on my newsletters. While that isn’t possible, feel free to jump into my reels section and go over it to see some of my process.

Happy New Year!

The year is wrapped and in the next few weeks I’ll do a nice recap of everything that happened worth noting. But for now it’s time for all of us be with family and friends and have some fun, ending the year in the best possible way. Wether you had a rough one or a good one, I hope 2023 treats you kindly. Whatever happens, you’re not alone. There’s always someone to be with.

We’ll talk again soon!

André