BzzzAP!

Here is another picture using my new SPLATTER, SCAN and FIDDLE technique:

I am pretty happy with how this one came out, though I may come back to it later and pump up the ZAP effect a little… It may be too subtle at this point? But while I think on that, in the meantime I have plenty more to do in the next few weeks…

25 thoughts on “BzzzAP!”

  1. Beautiful! Yeah the zap can be punched a bit otherwise..it’s great! Love the angularity of the elephant–especially in contrast to the soft lines of the earlier painting.

    Reply
  2. Benton>>thanks for the feedback. At times I thought the HUGE reaction of the elephant was funnier when contrasted with a tiny zap, and then the next minute I thought a big, bold, bright ZAP was the way to go…

    I was really going back and forward on that silly little detail while making this pic… until I decided to move on to the next one. It’s amazing, the things that I can get hung up on!

    Reply
  3. Hi Jamie! I just stumbled across your blog, and it looks great. Your comics look really nice too. I think I’m going to order some in the near future. (I have a couple things on order right now, so if I get them now, my wife will kill me.) But I will soon. I’m publishing my own comic right now as well , and it was interesting to read some of your interview, and see the similarities in getting it off of the ground. I love the elephant paintings as well.

    Reply
  4. Blair Kitchen>> Thank you for visiting. I quite understand if you want to delay buying any of my comics, till your wife is onboard with more comics-spending. I wouldn’t want you to be a victim of spouse-icide on my account.

    Clio>> Thanks. I have been meaning to try something like this for a while… I did some combinations of cartoony line-art and photo textures years ago, before I knew photoshop… (old school with glue and scissors) and liked how those came out… this way is a lot more flexible (but still time consuming).

    I like how Sho Murase (uses textile patterns in her work) and Denis Goulet (painterly textures) and Jose Luis Agreda get that neato blend of texture AND graphic designy shapes… they have all inspired me too.

    Reply
    • Hey Rob! I’d wanted to do many of the illustrations of Dad’s book analogue, but unfortunately I found that when I did so I took an incredibly long time to finish each piece. I was under a deadline, and needed to generate a lot of new artwork relatively quickly. So I did quite a few using digital media, because it gave me flexibility to experiment quickly.

      The approach varied for each individual illustration, but in the case of the illustration that you see here, the drawing of the elephant and the man is an ink line drawing on paper that was scanned in, and the background is a scan of a separate piece of artwork, where I just spattered coloured ink on paper.

      In the computer I was able to combine these two pieces of artwork. I also changed the colour values digitally. What you see here is a simple red and blue palette, but I think the original spattered ink was a different colour entirely. As you can probably see, the gradation on the background goes diagonally top to bottom red/blue, whereas the gradation on the characters is the exact opposite; red at the top gradating to the blue at the bottom.

      So once I got everything into the digital environment there was a fair bit of experimenting that happened very quickly.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.