Johnny's Angels

As part of this year's Creator Owned Day (March 5th, 2013) celebrations, I created a pin-up/print of Steph from Uproar Comics' Zombies Hi title.  We made a bit of an event out of it, posting the process on Instagram and sharing the images on Facebook and Twitter throughout the day: It was good fun and got a great response.  Here follows a re-cap of the creation process.

To begin, I had to come up with an image to draw (obviously).  I knew I wanted something sexy in the vein of the classic female pin-up, but with an edgy twist to reflect the nature of the Zombies Hi title, the character of Steph, and Uproar Comics in general.  It didn't take long for me to devise this one.

Steph cradling Johnny's guitar, "Roxxy" (featured in Issue 4 of Zombies Hi), with some Zombie head trophies tied to the headstock, in a pool of blood.  In my head, I wanted Steph to look very seductive, with a wicked smile and raised eyebrow.  I also wanted the pose itself to be on the tasteful side of risque but I had no intention of going down the road of having her nude with the guitar covering her modesty: for a start, I'm not confident enough yet to draw that honestly and it'd look a bit hedonistic.

Anyway, I digress.  With the rough idea sorted, I compiled some reference photos: pictures of a Gibson SG (beautiful guitar, and a classic), some girls cradling guitars in a similar pose (took a while to find some, and a fair amount of those girls turned out to be nude.  Go figure), plus I had to take pictures of my Converse All-Stars in a similar position to Steph's in the picture because I suck at drawing footwear (figuring out how the shape of feet change in different positions is a constant head-scratcher for me).
Reference images sourced, I lightly roughed out the pose on A3 using a 0.3mm 2H mechanical pencil.

The lines had to be heavy enough to be visible but easily erased.

I took my time with this and concentrated on proportions (both anatomical and the scale between Steph and the guitar), I also wanted to make sure the guitar was as close to the real thing as possible.  Once I was happy with the rough pencils I set about laying down the final, clean pencils with a 0.7mm 2h mechanical pencil.

Laying down clean pencils and erasing the rough pencils underneath

Finished pencils

With the pencils complete, the next phase was inking.  Although my grief with inking is well documented, this occasion was pretty hassle-free as I was working with one character on a large scale, rather than trying to ink a page of sequential comic book art.

Finished inks

I was pretty happy with my inking on this occasion, although I noticed afterwards that I'd made a few gaffs during the pencilling stage: some things look off, some areas have too much detail in them.  Ultimately, I feel I completely failed to make the pose, or Steph's expression, look any way seductive.  Meh, I'm considering it a learning experience.

Finally, it was time for colours: another process that causes me many headaches.  Given that this piece was supposed to be completed for Creator Owned Day, I realised I'd taken on more than I was capable of in the timeframe; a skilled artist could have probably drawn and coloured the image in half the time it took me to get the inks finished.  Lo and behold, Creator Owned Day was drawing to a close and I only had time to throw flat colours on my drawing...

This would give you a sense of the colour scheme I was going for, like a Sin City style pin-up, but it was way off the look I wanted to achieve through rendering.  Alas, it was too late to get such a job done for the end of Creator Owned Day, so I had to post this version on Tuesday.

However, we wanted to use this image as an exclusive print to give away to people who pre-order the next issue of Zombies Hi so yesterday (March 6th) I sat down to render the picture.  Without going into the detail I did when complaining about my limitations with inks, I struggled even more with colouring this one: colouring is another skill that intimidates me and a process I really struggle to comprehend when I look at other artists' work.
I did know, however, what look I wanted for mine, so referencing other comic artists to see how they tackled shade etc, I began a slow process of rendering the shades and highlights of this piece.  It took me pretty much all day, and I probably wasted time (as usual) going into details that wouldn't be seen in the final image, but I managed to get get it completed.

I'm happy with a few things I achieved with these colours, and I'm cringing even now at others.  Particularly what I wanted to achieve, and did, was colouring some of the line art to make Steph look softer, and the Colour Dodge haloing around Steph and the blood pool to give some idea of a slight source coming from behind.
It's still not 100% like I wanted it in my head but I'll get to that level eventually, I've already started compiling tutorials on the topic of colouring so I can start to break down the barrier between my ignorance and the skills required to achieve well rendered pages.  But that's for another post to bore you to death with.

Hope you like this.  If you want to pick up a print, keep an eye on the Uproar Store for Zombies Hi 8 pre-orders, which will come with a copy.  If you're really interested, there's a good chance we'll give away the original artwork in a draw from the people who have pre-ordered the issue.

Congratulations if you stuck with me to the end here: you win 10 points*.

All the best,
Ruairí

*these points have no value whatsoever, which is why I'm giving them away.