Quincunx Issue 1 Completed

I'm so relieved, after years of working on it, my graphic novel is finally coming together.

I've now completed a beta draft of the first issue...and here are the first few pages.

If you're interested in reading it (before I send it off for submission to various pubishers), I'll try to send across a pdf of the first issue.

Anyway, here's the first few pages...






Comments

Rob Lang said…
Nice work, there, Vulp!

What do you use for your character renders?
Thursday, 03 February, 2011
Vulpinoid said…
It's a complex process, but seeing some of your work I know that you realise that good renders are never simple.

I take photographs for my render backgrounds, then I'll often tweak them in photoshop. The figures are rendered in DAZ studio (since it's free), the figures and most of the costumes I use on them have been freebies collected over the years. If I'm generating something with specifically customized objects that I can't get photos of, I'll export the DAZ figure into Bryce and render it there (I didn't do that with these figures since this preliminary sequence was a pretty simple scene).

I'll often spend hours trying to get the lighting and depth of field just right to mesh the figures into the photographic background as much as possible.

With these rendered images, I re-imported them to Photoshop for some postwork. 2 layers, one set at 50% opacity and the one beneath it at 100% opacity. This gives me the ability to apply two different filters to the image and average the results of them. In this case, I used a pallet knife filter on the over-layer, the specific settings I've used convert the image to thick smears of colour. On the underlayer I used a watercolour filter with settings to bring out contrast and edge detail.

I've played with dozens of filter combinations, but I think these two give a painted look to the renders, instead of leaving them too smooth and CGI looking. I'm still tweaking the exact finish and the filters used, because some of the images further into the book are losing to much clarity in this process...they are turning from well defined renders and photos and into blocky non-descript shapes.

That's my basic process for a single image. I think there are some good GIMP filters that could be used to similar effect.

A page is made up of a background image, several comic panel images each on their own layer, followed by a text box layer, and above it all sits the text layer.

Using this method, I generated up the story a few years ago (before I wrote my Quincunx game), I then spent a solid year just generating renders and getting the image manipulation to a degree that I was happy with. Then I've done a series of pen an ink drawing to go with it as well. It's taking me a solid day to compile a single page from the components I've gathered over the years, and occasionally I need to render up a new image when the story just doesn't seem right and I need to take things in a slightly different direction.

It's a hell of a job, but it's my labour of love.
Thursday, 03 February, 2011
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