Dylan Williams Benefit Auction

Floating World is doing some good work to raise money for Dylan Williams' battle with cancer. I've got the above painting up for auction as a part of the benefit here. An 11x17 print will also be available through Floating World. You can check out other auction items here. And of course you should buy comics from Sparkplug. I recommend Lemon Styles by David King and Neverland by Dave Kiersh.

Newswire

Two things:

1. I'll be at the San Francisco Zine Fest this weekend! It was a lot of fun last year, so I'm really looking forward to the 2011 edition. Plus its all caps FREE.

September 3 & 4, 2011

11am - 6pm

San Francisco County Fair Building

1199 9th Ave and Lincoln Way

in Golden Gate Park

2. Expansion has undergone some edits, and its become too big for one issue. Seriously, we can't staple that many pages together. A 28 page Part Three will debut at APE on October 1 & 2, and then PART FOUR will come in November!

Process

I always like seeing other people's process creating comics, so I thought I'd share how Matt Sheean and I put an Expansion page together.

First, I write a "script", although it's almost an outline. It has dialogue and everything, but it's not very detailed. This way the story is more of a collaboration between myself and Matt. From there Matt creates thumbnails for the whole book. Here is his thumbnail for page 9 of Expansion Part 3:

After the thumbnails are finished we make revisions. The sequence that page 9 is a part of got shuffled around, so the layout changed. Matt starts working on the pencils, usually giving them to me in batches of 2-4 pages at a time as he finishes them. The pencils for page 9:

Matt keeps the pencils loose so that the finished image is also more collaborative. I get the page back and use the following tools:

Recently I've been using a Japanese brush pen that I don't know the name of. (This is a little different for me, I usually use the watercolor brush next to it) I use a 08 Micron for the panel borders, and the Staedtler for lettering. Page 9 doesn't have lettering... so we won't get into that. My inks, unedited:

Expansion has a flat grey tone for most of the book. After I finish inking the main page, I tape another piece of paper to it and use a light board to create the shapes that will be grey:

I scan the two parts in and tidy them up. I put the grey tone (which at this point is still solid black) on its own layer, set it to "Multiply", and then change the opacity to a grey tone. For page 9 it's a little darker because it takes place at night.

That's that! Here's the final page:

Roke in Color

Why did I color this? I don't know.

Expansion Three in October

Here's a page (minus the dialogue) from Expansion Part Three, which Matt Sheean and I are working on. It'll be done in time for APE, the first weekend of October! I'll be posting more images as work progresses.