Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Some noir

Finally done some drawing! It was definitely a struggle to start with, but Huzzah has a deadline and that helps focus your mind, and I did learn a few things - mainly that I should block in shapes and compose before I start drawing.

This is for the Huzzahnoir blog, which I hope everyone is following. It's taken a move into slightly different territory recently with a time and location change to WWII Paris, looking at the story so far it seems inevitable and planned, and expands things nicely. I also got a chance to dig through some holiday snaps for reference.

2 comments:

Faff said...

Funny how you seem to be settling into three styles. There's a very British style on your realistic work like this, which wouldn't look out of place in any british adventure comic of the 60's and 70's and your more cartoony style for things like astrodog with a sort of 50's animation angularity to it and finally there's a sort of in between style that melds the best bits of both styles very successfully. Nice to see someone who can change their style to match the material so well. Moebius is one of the few I can think of who does this.

paulhd said...

Cheer's for the kind words, Peter.
I'd say I have settled on the 3 styles, the Astrodog one, the uninked style I've been using for regular huzzah, but the 3rd is whatever suits the subject matter one.
HZ is me attempting to emulate folk like Mazzuchelli, Toth (particularly Dell era), Jose Munoz and Hugo Pratt. There's a few other artists in that mix, but the last 2 are probably what's making you think of 60/70's British adventure stuff. I'm a big fan of Solano Lopez's work from that era too, and I bet his use of inky blacks is influencing me.
Funny, I spent a long time trying to make my inking as slick as possible, but now I much prefer the scribbly pencil look, and the HN art - if you're interested I use a very fat brush pen, and a disposable caligraphic pen inking here.
Phew, that's a long reply!