BLAST FROM THE PAST

My Dad just handed me this.  Something from my grade school days.  It's Volume 4 of The Amazing Adventures of Flash Gordon.  Still fantastic.  One day I hope to draw a comic just like this. :-)

Revising and Revisiting Some Head Studies

Doing some exercises.  The bald guy was inspired by an old  Batou sketch I posted on my FB in 2016. I drew Batou with this really large jaw and short nose.  Keeping that in mind, I did a quick ink sketch (the one at the bottom) of the bald guy---except that he turned out to have "good" eyes.  The character's supposed to be a tough guy with a bad history.

 So, I did another quick sketch (this time in digital) and fixed the eyes and chin a bit to give him that look (line work placed on gray with white highlights).

MAKING CHAPTER 6 OF THE DOORKEEPER ANTHOLOGY PART 1

THE EMAIL FROM ANOTHER WORLD
While in the middle of fixing the Dark Colony Clasificado in April 2017, I received an email from two guys. The email was an invite to take part in a comic book project called the Doorkeeper, with five other artists.  Later on, I found out that the guys who sent the invite were writers (and still students).  One guy was studying in Stanford and the other in Yale-NUS College Singapore.

I've only collaborated with a couple of my friends (who are awesome by the way)---which means they're old like me. So, collaborating with younger minds got me interested.  I was trying to imagine the end result of the collaboration and how my translation of their ideas into visuals would be. I couldn't picture it.

But one thing was clear...these two crazy guys were serious. More than anything, these guys reminded me of me and my friends when we were young and trying to get our first comic published.

That and the idea of seeing other awesome artists interpreting the other chapters was the clincher.


FROM SCRIPT TO CONCEPT ART
As writers and creators of the Doorkeeper, Scott Chua and Ethan Chua (I must admit, I thought they were brothers for the longest time--found out they weren't after loooooong time) would keep tabs on all the the artists via FB and emails.

We would discuss things like schedules, specs, scripts, fonts, and concept art.

Concept art.

Most people who know how I work, know how much I love visual research.  The Doorkeeper project didn't require me to go to museums or visit old Spanish structures (like for the the Dark Colony books) but doing those quick concept sketches was still a form of research. So, that was great!

My chapter in the Doorkeeper was pretty short.  Around 19 pages...and the required concept sketches weren't that detailed or extensive but really fun to do.   

They definitely made drawing the actual pages of the book easier.

Something about the story and the twist in the end dictated the art style I used in the book.  It felt like an old-school 80's Twilight Zone story (as a close friend of mine, who read the story early on, mentioned in one of our chats).  I guess that's why I tried my best to create the feel of old-school 80's comics through color and line work without making it feel old.

Below are some of the rough concept drawings for chapter 6 of the book.

Rough concept designs

Stay tuned for part two! I'll try posting the actually process of illustrating the pages.  Thanks for visiting, folks!

*The Doorkeeper Anthology is available at your favorite local bookstores.
Written and created by Scott Lee Chua and Ethan Chua
Illustrated by Brent Sabas, Allen Geneta, Bianca Lesaca, Gia Duran, Aaron Felizmenio, Jap Mikel, Bow Guerrero, Raymund Bermudez
Published by Summit Books