A surprise coming your way...

Last year I had lots of little presents and surprises... this year I only have one and it will begin tomorrow... are you ready?

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 11

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 10

Lucerio - The End

I hope you enjoyed this story.
I was very passionated about it when I was a kid and was happy to find it hiding in my drawers still in one piece (not eaten up but weird lobster looking bus who enjoy eating paper).

Lio will tell you

Lio has a little surprise for you, it's a secret, she will only tell you in two days!

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 9

Lucerio - page 29

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 8

Lucerio - page 28

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 7

Secret Santa - all wishes adopted.

Thank you all very much,
all the Secret Santa wishes were adopted, some even twice.

So now we go in reverse and post about the ones already delivered.

Here's an update of the ones who have already been completed:
1) Picture of Martin and Pea
2) Picture of Martin and pea
3) Picture of Cat and Callista pg13
4) Pifo poem
5) Picture of Tora

5 gone 12 more to go :D

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 6

Lucerio - page 27

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 5

Sorry I am late I had to do some cleaning around the house.

Watercolor Tutorial

Hi, here is my watercolor working process:

 

 Watercolor does not scan too well and a lot of times it is better to take pics of watercolor rather than scanning it in.

So sometimes something nice like this drawing... will come out not as blue and not as nice when you scan it.

Eventually I like nice and bright colors but not matter how I fix the color balance things always look yellowish to me... so I started painting in yellow light LOL.

 This is my watercolor set.
I have different brands cubes in there but I basically started with tubes (which could be transparent or opaque) and ended up using mainly little cubes because it's easier to carry around.

Those are my synthetic brushes, they have a tank in their handle for the water.
So I squeeze the brush and get the water out.

 So, how I work is very simple, I think everybody does it this way, right?

I do my first layer very light so there's a lot of water and very little pigment.

Some things I paint wet on wet (so I wet the surface first) but even when I do that I don't wet the surface with simple water, there's always a bit of the color in it.

 I do all of my skin tones first... so that the color stays the same throughout.

So I mix the color once and then I paint all the faces and hands first.

 I always hold a piece of tissue in my hand... that's my undo.

One one hand I clean my brush often, on the other hand I might need to tap on the paper if - by any chance - I happened to have dropped too much paint/water/color on the surface.

Transparent watercolor is not so unforgiving and it's easy to fix problems.

Another thing I do is... I dry the brush tip in case I need to move the paint around (I'll show that in a video).

 Crimson is my favourite color to add in shadows.

I also drop a bit of crimson in all my yellow to make my yellow richer and more to the golden side.

 I also have different size brushed.
Small one for details, flat one for washes...

The skin tone comes from Burnt Sienna.

 The blush I do wet on wet...

It means that I add the red to the skin tone I already created and then I drop the pigment on the already wet surface.

I think the best way to show you how I approach the coloring is to actually make a video.
Sorry the quality is not super good and it's hard to paint with one hand while holding the camera with the other hand...
I usually prefer to have a firm grip on the paper as I paint and also a firm grip on my tissue.

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 4

Lucerio - page 26

All I have! - Part 2 - Page 3

Lucerio - page 25

All I have! - Reprise - page 2

Lucerio - page 24

All I have! - Reprise - Page 1

All I have! - Reprise - Cover.

So... back into release mode are we, yes?

Lucerio - page 23

I'm back!

I am back, comics will start again very soon!


 I hope the illustrations were enough to keep you company (I worked my ass off to get them ready before I left hahahaha)


Between conferences and festivals and meeting I had a one hour break to go and draw at the temple behind my hotel.

3 years old little girls, started showing up wearing kimonos for

their Shichigosan!

Rushed but wonderful experience, Digicon6 was amazing too!

So many talented animators out there, but not properly recognized I'm afraid (the one I liked did not win and the one who won ... well, was something I have seen many times on youtube before - therefore take advantage of the generational gap with the judges, ppl, they don't live on the internet hahaha)


The most interesting meeting was with Tomioka Satoshi, creator of Usavich, he is a bit blur and that's quite unlucky if you want to work in a money making industry...

I say that because I feel they take advantage of his talent and he is not making a single penny out of his own ideas. His new project is quite delightful Yan Yan Machiko ... but he is basically broke! Sigh!

I love kitties

My best friend

Greetings from Japan

Pillow and blanket fort

Almost there

and updated secret santa:
current wishlist is:

1) Kane and Castalia little comic
2) A picture of Josh or Foxy
3) Cat and callista

plus there s a request for an OC who could not make it for the oc contest... if you are willing to help the author let me know.

Different Interests

care to put dialogues in?

Lucerio - page 22

All I have! - page 10

Page 10 concludes the first part of this special "All I have!", that is made of three parts (like movies yaay).

Now I have one good news and a very bad one:
1) I already started on the second half
2) I won't be able to upload anything until saturday because my boss is shipping me to tokyo to participate to Digicon6 all of a sudden and I can only carry my ipad which is still not supported by many websites and stuff. (particularly not Deviant Art) while I'm away

I have two favors to ask:
 1) Spread the luuuuv
2) Keep playing the secret Santa because I will still be able to update the list.

 btw current wishlist is:
 1) Kane and Castalia little comic
2) A picture of Martin and Pea
3) Surprise me! (that's what the person said)
4) I would like to see some ugly pirate who wouldn't be just comic relief or villain. or some really cool landscape scenario, with city explosions and ship battles...

Thank you all for reading and sorry to keep you waiting for so long.

The fact is... I have been swamped by bureaucracy to prepare for this trip and everything collapsed on me (so no Flower and Nose, no Pirate's wife and I only have a few pages ready for Lucerio)... so I prefer to put a pause here at the end of the first part of "All I have" and the do the second half in one go

I hope you won't mind. Once again, sorry,

Lucerio - page 21

All I have! - page 9

Making of - All I have!

The making of a comic always starts from the storyboard:

After which I draw a rough version of the drawings with cool-erase blue-red-green and then ink it using either a ball point pen or a g-pilot pent.

After I am done inking the lines I erase the red pencil lines.

I do the rendering in Prismacolor black... it's a colored pencil but very soft.

Then I scan in the pages in grayscale and open Photoshop.
I place the images in the page and turn the layers to multiply to see through.

I adjust my panels to the correct size. they are drawn with the object too, set to multiply and have a drop shadow.

I use the panels to mask the drawings by selecting them from the path menu and then loading the selection tool and applying a mask.

After that I merge the drawings in one layer, they get back to normal opacity so I have to set it back to multiply, throw an overlay of brown and apply to the drawings' layer.

After that I pick a soft brush and with the panels masked I start painting the background first.

I paint them and texture them in full opacity.

 But once I am done I turn the opacity down to 61% (for this particular special it's the value I chose for the Background)

After that I pick a brush with hard edges and color the characters. Flat.

So after I am done with the colors and all the opacities are turned down...

 ...then I add the shadows.... and the highlights.

One more step to take, which is lettering.
But fundamentally the page is done :D

I hope this answers some of your questions!