Chapter 1 final (Deg Illustrations)

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Fri, 17 Mar 2017

This is the finished illustration, all inked (and pencilled, come to that) in Manga Studio / Clip Studio Pro, at A4 / 600 dpi (around 6000 x 8000 pixels), using a Wacom Intuos 5 tablet.

I’d only recently got a decent tablet, thanks to an incredibly kind gift from my friend Gordon Hall, who donated his unused Intuos when he heard my old Wacom Graphire (itself a kind donation from my friend Nick Dimmock years earlier) was made redundant by Mac OS’s new driver model, and I was too broke to buy a new one. I’d only just picked up Clip Studio as well, and this was going to be the first drawing project I’d attempt to do all-digitally, so I was very much still getting to grips with digital inking here.

I was very happy with the background. I was worried at first that I couldn’t keep up this level of detail for 11 drawings, but realised I could resort to shading patterns and ‘Kirby crackle’ (always fun and easy to draw) to fill in areas where I hadn’t drawn anything proper, and the whole thing would still work.

I knew I needed something to contrast with the dense detail of the background, to stop the whole drawing feeling flat and monotonous, and had decided early on to do a large close up of a face filling at least half the page. The book was clearly about the author’s own life, so I nabbed one of Pat’s profile images, distorted it a bit in Photoshop, and used that as a basis for the main drawing. No pencils, as I just quickly inked over the top of the distorted photo with a fat G-pen.

I hadn’t asked Pat in advance if I could use his face, I just sent him the finished drawing to see what he thought. He liked it (and we ended up using the face for the book’s cover), so now I just had to repeat the process ten more times...

Click the 'Predecessor post' link below to see the pencil version.

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Tags: deg, chapter01, drawing, illustration, book, novel, ink, wacom, clip studio pro

Predecessor post: Chapter 1 pencils (Deg Illustrations)

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