I started buying comics published through Amazon’s Comixology recently, I wanted to be able to read comics on my tablet and one thing I noticed was that the downloaded stories all had cover art. That prompted me to consider doing a cover for Negative Boy. So I’ve added some cover art to start the story!

I’ve been pretty busy the last few months working on the next installment of this story. I’ve got 16 new pages all inked up and waiting for me to color them. Producing this story has definitely been a learning process. The art is much better in the second episode than the first because I set the page resolution too low when I began working on the artwork.  Ugh, live and learn.

My initial plan was to just build the story as a web comic so when I started setting up my story in Clip Studio Paint, I was thinking primarily about keeping the file sizes smaller so the website loads fast. So I basically set up the pages to be smaller and proportioned to fit a screen. Unfortunately this resulted in images that aren’t as crisp as they could be. I thought doing the artwork at 1100 x 800 @ 600dpi would give me crisp enough images for web display but it really isn’t.

So after having produced the first episode and finding I was really unhappy with the results, I decided in the second episode, I basically doubled the size and resolution of the images. I think that really made the difference. It’s painful for me to look at the image quality of the sequential art as compared to the cover art, but I’m telling myself it’s like how comics use to be when I was a kid, the cover art was always better than the interior art. Yeah it’s a rationalization but it is giving me the mental justification to not halt all production and spend time I don’t have, re-drawing the first episode.

I’m not saying I won’t eventually re-draw those pages, but for now I’m focused on moving forward.

Building the cover art

I personally love looking at how images are built, I love the process and with that in mind I thought I’d post some production screenshots of the cover as it was being built. Below is a gallery of images from the blue-line sketches all the way to the finished artwork.