Not all of these things have to be concept pieces. They can be action shots!

(Mixing sizes & shapes makes doing layout work a lot more fun.)

Here's what the character looked like the first time I drew him, wayyy back in 2003:



...and here's the redesigned character, as of about an hour ago:



Not bad at all.

Oh, yeah... the_tall_man, here's your icon:



Ciao! Next up, Shing!!

Painting now. I'm very used to not using a tablet for airbrushy work; I've always preferred color fills, perfect gradients and stuff like that -- so this is me getting uot of my comfort zone a bit and playing with Painter.

This piece should be done by Sunday night, I would think.

The inks are done, and now what I've done is filled the subject with a flat gray, so I can see it in silhouette if needed. This actually serves a dual function: in addition to the standard rule of silhouette in cartooning (which I've talked about before), it also allows me to use the silhouette layer as a mask to avoid artifacts and other mistakes. This is something I wish I had don'e with the Cog Wars cover, but you know. Hindsight.

The inking is a combination of freehand inking in Corel, and vector inking in Photoshop (for the big ellipses, I want perfect roundness to offset the cartoony aspect of the work).

Once the basic outline is finished, the second wave of inks happens, where the work gets decidedly less stark.

More as it happens (it's a slow process, because the computer's not fixed yet).

Theeeeeeeeeeeeere we go.

This sketch is less cartoony than I would like, but it's a better model of the character. Reuben is a bodyguard, peacekeeper and (eventually) a heavy-for-hire.


Also, guess what happens when I need really complex perspective but can't really draw it at all? I hit the Photoshop tools:



More to come.

This is it. Overall, I'm really happy with how this turned out. It took me a thousand years to figure it all out and get everything right, but all in all, I'm as pleased as I will ever be about my work.

The dimensions of it are a bit wonky, but it will fit on the cover of a book (more or less), and that's what's important. Besides, we can always form-fit the book to match the cover... couldn't we?

Peace out, kids. Come the weekend, it's all fan art, random commissions, and Stik (we miss you, Stik)!

We're in the home stretch now. The hair and fabric on this thing is kicking my ass, but I'll get it done by the end of next week, because I have to or I'll start hating it. :)

A lot of my work on River City Mechanical in terms of the robots' design comes from years of working with these clockwork dudes on what would become the_tall_man's RPG: The Cog Wars. I'll let him drone on about that. This is the cover of that book, which is woefully late (which I suppose doesn't make a LOT of difference, seeing as the book is going through its own remastering, too).

Anyway. The initial piece that was working on was vector inked and used gradients and textures to create a very 3D feel. That was neat, and in places it really kicked ass, but it didn't look natural -- and part of the reason I never finished it was because I couldn't ink it by hand, and the vector thing wasn't working. It's here, just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. It's good -- but not what I wanted. It doesn't feel alive to me.



So I'm going to try redoing it with the tablet, and see what happens. Hopefully people will like it so much I'll get paid! Yay! Food is nice.

--JL