I initially posted this over on the Tim Sale board.
BISHOCK - PROCESS DESCRIPTION
I did this piece as part of a submission for a Bioshock comic. The project never happened and the book won't be coming out at that company anymore.
Anyway, They wanted Big Daddy from the game and an Art Deco element in the background. There's also a little creepy girl that rides him around. My design is based on Internet research and screenshots since I haven't played the game. I started with a digital sketch done in Photoshop 7.0 with my BAMBOO FUN® Wacom Tablet.
Here's the digital prelim:
Then I changed that into a blue duotone image in photoshop and printed it out on 11"x17" comic board. I penciled over the blue-line sketch, tweaking some things and tightening it up, then I started inking.
I only had a day to do the pencils and inks because of another deadline, so I only got so far before I had to resort to going digital.
I prefer to do everything on a board so I can have it in tactile form, but sometimes I have to do things digitally. On this one I ran out of time and had to go to the computer.
I used a 102 nib with a crow quill, black higgins water-proof ink, and maybe some microns. I used a winsor-newton series 7 #2 for the tattered decco elements.
This is me inking the piece during the in-store signing I did at Hurley's Heores on the day We Will Bury You #1 was released.
So this is how the piece looked when I scanned it. You can see the blue under-drawing and some of the loose pencils:
When I do something on paper or on a board, I always go over it with some kind of white pigment to make little changes and fix mistakes. This allows me to not be so spot-on with the pencils and inks which saves time and gives me more confidence in mark-making. I can be more painterly. There are also things I've noticed that can be done with white-on-black that can't be done as easily with just black-on-white.
Anyway, I had to do that all digitally here. Here's the final piece again. You can see a lot of the things I tweaked. Were I to change anything now, I'd probably mess with the little girl's stance and figure out a different way to do the drill. If I were to start from scratch, I'd probably try to make Big Daddy in action somehow, maybe fighting some of the bad guys from the game:
Then I sent it off to Jacobe Baake who colored it it in:
8.09.2010
