My last process post on Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Pax Americana went over pretty well, so let’s try that again, shall we?

For the cover to the first issue of Nameless, the new Image comic by Grant, Chris Burnham, and me, the concept was to reference the iconic scene of astronauts striding purposefully forward from The Right Stuff and to subvert that with our own spin. In our story, the ‘astronauts’ are covered in ancient glyphs and sigils to ward off evil, and they are not exploring the depths of space, but the depths of fear itself.

Step One: thumbnails/design

The last design is quite strong, but it was unanimously agreed that the first was the real winner.

(Oh, yeah, the original working title for the story was Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, or roughly translated, 'place of fear’.)

Step Two: pencils

These are kind of rough, but Burnham inks his own work, and he likes to do a fair amount of drawing and detail work right in the inking phase. I think it keeps him more interested and engaged while inking and keeps a certain amount of energy and vitality in his finished work.

Or maybe he’s just a sloppy penciller and this is the best he can do.

Step Three: inks

There we go. That’s the stuff, Burnham.

As you can see, Burnham has inked the piece with a dead line (a line that has no variation in its thickness). He hasn’t indicated lighting and shading with hatching or spotted blacks or anything like that. It’s basically just a contour drawing. In comics, this is often referred to as ligne claire (“clear line” in French). I don’t know if he actually coined the phrase himself, but Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist of Tintin fame, is considered by most to be a pioneer of this style of drawing/cartooning/inking. More on this in a minute.

Burnham also inked the glyphs and sigils on a separate layer.

Step Four: pick a style

To a colorist, working with a ligne claire drawing is both exciting and daunting. There’s almost no limit to what you can do. It can be a piece of cake or a total nightmare, depending on your tastes and ambition. You can go for simple, bold, flat colors, as Hergé did ('flat’ in this context meaning without any lighting, shading, or modelling of forms done with color); you can do a cel-shaded style, like in classic 2D animation, where you have a base color and a highlight color; or you can spend an entire work day painting the sweet loving Christ out of the thing.

Guess which one I chose.

Step Five: cast shadows.

If I had drawn this thing, I’d know where the light source is (you’d hope). But I didn’t, so I had to extrapolate its location from the shadows that Burnham had cast on the ground. (I guess I could have just asked him, but I’m an idiot. So.) First I had to find the vanishing point of the shadows like so:

Then I had to rough (and I mean rough) in the rest of the cast shadows so I could triangulate the location of the light source.

Most colorists probably wouldn’t have bothered with that. It’s probably enough to just eyeball the thing and understand that the light source is behind the figures, but I’m obsessive enough to need to know where behind.

Anyway, once I had a good idea of where the light was coming from, I could quickly rough in where the light (I imagined it being a focused, intense beam) would directly strike the figures.

Something like that, anyway. I manfully resisted the patently insane impulse to sketch out the thing from the side to double check that my lighting was right.

I mean, that would have been insane, right? Who would do something like that? NOT ME, THAT’S FOR SURE! NOPE. HAHA!

Anyway, enough thinking. Time to start coloring already.

Step Six: paint the background

Just some fuzzy, crunchy smoke with a hot spot where I want the eye focused and some nice vignetting at the edges. I just threw this down in a minute or two to inform my overall palette, but ended up leaving it mostly unchanged in the final image.

Hot Tip: never paint your foreground figures before setting your background first. Seriously, just don’t do it, friends. I could explain why, but this thing is already starting to drag on.

Step Seven: flat color the figures

If you examine the line art closely you’ll see that the middle guy has a different suit from the other two figures, which made me happy since I wanted the central guy to have a different color suit for the sake of symmetry and focus.

Hergé might call this done at this point, but I say, “Pipe down, Frenchie: I’m just getting warmed up here.”

Step, Like … Eight? : paint the figures

This is where having figured out where the light source is paid off and I could more or less confidently hit them with a strong rim light. With all the mist and haze going on, there’s also a lot of grey/blue/green ambient light scattering around and hitting the figures. (If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice this is also where I ditched the line indicating the cast shadows for good.)

Step, um … : glows

Here’s where I added a glow to the rim light to intensify it and to add some separation between the central figure and the other two horrornauts. I painted it right on top of the line work itself, thus obscuring some of those pretty lines. Some inkers hate this like fire, but Burnham’s cool. He knows what’s up.

Step I Don’t Even Know: MOAR SMOAK

MOAR SMOAK.

Step Whatever: You Forgot the Sigils, Dumbass

Oh, right.

And here’s what the final color work looks like with the line art removed completely, if you’re curious:

Step THIS IS THE LAST STEP: Put A Bird Logo On It

Rian Hughes came up with this logo and it is the fucking business. That guy is good at his job. http://rianhughes.tumblr.com/

And that’s it!

If you’re interested in reading more about Nameless, here’s a link to a preview of issue #1. It’s in stores now!





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