Behind the Pluckery (Part I)
As most of you guys have probably already gotten sick of used to by now, I like to post sketches and such just to share a bit of the process behind certain projects. Here are the rough thumbnails for PLUCK, along with the finished fully inked renderings.
Though the roughs for page one were pretty much what I wanted to go with fairly early on, this still took a bit longer than I wanted because I was actually designing the characters right on the page. I had done a handful of prelim sketches to get some looks down, but I wasn’t really happy with any of them. I’m a big fan of HBO’s Entourage though, and it may not be apparent to anyone other than myself, but I imagine Pluck’s mannerisms and speech to resemble that of a young Kevin Connoly.
The black outlines for clouds in panels 2 and 3 were afterthoughts, but I hope they helped to add a bit of weight as well as frame those beats in the story.
I imagined Dreda to have black hair initially, but I found it fit the character better to have her be a dirty blonde. The negative silhouette of the knight on the horse was a late addition to this page, as I felt the thumbnail needed a bit of clarity.
This was easily one of my favorite pages to do, since it’s the first time it becomes apparent that we’re dealing with a fantasy story. And I gotta say… nothing pisses me off more than pretty boy knights, so I was just snickering as I was putting this together.
The last panel of this page came out a little less dynamic than I would have liked, but I think it’s somewhat clear anyway.
A coupla big influences on how the art for PLUCK came together was Mignola’s Baltimore and Tony Moore’s run on Walking Dead. I don’t have any grays in it at all, but I thought this a threshold version of a grayscale image. Granted that most black and white stories are either horror or crime, a comedic fantasy needed a bit more hatching for some midtones, so I looked at some old copies Xenozoic Tales I still have. It’d be great to come back to this and slap down some gray tones myself though, so I guess we’ll see…
I hope you guys found this interesting. I’ll post the second half of the commentary in a coupla days.
You can read the actual comic here. We’d really appreciate your votes!
