"Quill & Quire" Cover Process

As you may or may not have noticed, I'm on the cover of the current (November) issue of Canadian literary magazine Quill & Quire. The issue includes a nice two-page profile of yours truly, as well as all the usual news and reviews that make the magazine great, so go pick yourself up a copy before my mother buys them all.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've done a "process" post, so I'll peel away the layers on this one to show you how it was done:






First, of course, was the concept sketch. The Quill & Quire folks wanted something with me at my drawing table, surrounded by some of my characters. That's a pretty well-worn trope for cartoonist self-portraits, but I came up with some variations on it that managed to avoid the stereotype (I hope!), the favourite of which is below (I won't bother posting the others; they weren't very good).

Once I got the go-ahead on the concept, I enlarged the rough and did a tighter pencil drawing, removing two of the framed book covers on the wall at the art director's request, in order to make room for cover copy. The art director also requested I add a second character materializing from the drawing board on the left. I was reluctant at first, but now I kind of like it.

In the ink stage, I filled out my face a little more and added a few small wrinkles. The pencil version looks like me at about age 25, but doesn't necessarily reflect (ahem) current reality.

Then, on to colour! At this point, the art gets scanned into Photoshop, then I separate all the shapes on a layer below the line art, and fill them with their full, bright, daytime colours.

Then, I create another layer on which I "paint" the shadows, using a prominent background colour (green, in this case) with a custom Photoshop brush. The shaded areas can then be darkened or lightened using that layer's opacity controls.

On yet another new layer, I flood the image with an ambient light colour (in this case, a pale yellow). Then I select the shaded areas and delete them from this layer, creating areas of light that are "cut" neatly against the shadows. Again, keeping them on a separate layer allows me to control the intensity of the light by adjusting the opacity.

Next, I "paint" in highlights, this time in a bright white.

And, finally, I create some colour "holds" to make sure my eyebrows and chin stubble are orange, not black. (You may need to click for the bigger version to really see this step).

And we're done! Thanks to the folks at Quill & Quire for the flattering coverage, and for allowing me (and Topper and Fisk) to hijack their cover for a month!