I started off in comics as an artist, but my slow speed and somewhat noncommercial style turned me into a writer pretty quickly. But I try and keep active with my artwork, drawing covers for DMZ, mostly. I also pencilled, inked, and colored (as well as wrote) DMZ #12 which, despite all my bitching about how much it took out of me, I hope to do again someday. Anyway, I make these covers in a fairly unconventional style, I think.. for example “pencils” never happen with me. I can’t remember the last time I used one. Here’s a breakdown of how the cover for DMZ #14 came to be:

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1. This is the sketch I emailed in to my editor Will Dennis. This was done pretty quickly in Photoshop with my wacom and a couple photos. I’ll often use photos, generally my own, to indicate what I’ll eventually draw by hand. As far as my cover sketches go, this one is pretty loose. Most of the time I have such a clear idea in my head of what I want, and since I make these digitally, I’ll just go ahead and start what ends up being the final, working at 600 dpi. Saves a lot of time. The “sketch” I did for Global Frequency #1 was, essentially, the final cover. Anyway, this sketch was approved and I was given the go ahead.

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2. I had just gotten my wacom tablet when I started this cover, so I was still a little uncomfortable using it. I sketched these soldiers by hand on paper, taped the paper to the wacom and traced over my own drawing, in an attempt to “learn on the job”. I don’t have that paper sketch, sorry to say. Here’s the drawing before I started coloring it:

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3. I went ahead and colored just the top half of the cover first… I always work in pieces and parts and assemble later, kind of like building a song from a lot of separate tracks, if you excuse the music metaphor. I was a little lazy here and duped the drawing for the second row of soldiers. Which I am not proud of, but the decision to add that second row came pretty late in the process and time was a factor. Also, the camo pattern - I have this great book of royalty-free camo patterns from all over the world… amazing resource. The smoke effect is also something I use a lot. At the start of DMZ I drew a lot of smoke effects in ink for the first issue and use them even now. In this case I turned it into a halftone and changed the color. The rifles I drew in from reference as part of the coloring process.

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4. Moving on to the bottom half. Here are three separate cityscapes I drew, in ink on paper, to composite together. Some of these have popped up in other covers as well. I love drawing these, weirdly… they are big originals, about 17″ long, and I get a little zen while doing them.

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5. The drawing of the woman was very simple and quick. Not much changed from the sketch. I simply dropped her onto the cityscape background I built. The cityscape is complete underneath her, it extends the full width of the page, so I could reposition her as I felt I needed and not worry about exposing any gaps in the background art. I finished it off with more smoke, some tiny helicopters I drew, and a teeny bit of color. Oh, there is part of a photo I took along the bottom of the cityscape… pretty sure its a shot of piers.

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6. The final. I put the two halves together, added the book title and credits, and I already had the top element done from the sketch. I did this all within a day or so, the drawing of the soldiers with the wacom taking at least 60% of the total time. Now, I use the wacom for about half the drawing you see… every DMZ cover has some kind of original, ink on paper, even if its just a sketch I scan in and clean up.

That’s it for me today. I’m up to my eyeballs in deadlines. Have a good weekend!

-bri

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.