Work in Progress – ‘Bloodhunt’

August 07, 2017

Following on from last month’s post, I’ve continued to work on James Broadhurst’s script for, ‘Bloodhunt’. James contacted me out of the blue through this website, showed me his script and asked if it was something I’d be interested in working on. After reading it, I readily agreed, it was exciting, concise and with a great twist! We discussed what he wanted for the artwork which was six pages in full colour and lettered.

Thumbnails to Pencils

I set to work immediately, reading and re-reading the script, making copious amounts of sketches and notes in the margins – it was barely readable by the time I’d finished with it! This wasn’t a great concern though, as it had served its purpose in essentially super charging my brain cells and providing the needed stimulus for thumbnail page sketches. I added a lot to the original script here, chiefly by way of additional panels to employ atmospheric devices and better pacing control for action sequences. From the thumbnails I went to full size sketches of the pages, or ‘Pencils’ done digitally, taking the time to add the dialogue and speech balloons, factoring their placement in the layout design. Once the sketch pages were complete, these were packaged up and run past James for his approval and feedback.

Pencils to Inks

Taking on board James’ suggestions and updating the ‘Pencils’ accordingly, I then printed out the pages on A3 illustration board. I could have avoided this step and continued to work digitally, but I wanted to work with ‘real media’ for this one. Increasingly, I find there’s a real reward to the tactile response of the page and I feel it lends a quality that can’t be reproduced digitally. Where I needed to resolve some of the detail in the pencils I used a non-photo blue pencil to work up the illustration. Once I was happy with the details, I began inking using a Fineliner. Knowing that colour work would be done digitally, I kept the line work clean, allowing room for the colouring to take the weight of the modelling. The finished inks were then scanned and cleaned up on the computer by dropping out the blue, removing some of the line work I wasn’t happy with (compare each of the panel fives in the image below) and strengthening the black.

Colouring

Colouring is always a big job as it needs to somehow straddle both realism and mood. As the story was set in the Australian bush, I also wanted to make a real effort to use a palette that was sympathetic to this. However, the story is a horror story, full of foreboding and I also wanted to incorporate this element. It was an interesting challenge as palettes associated with horror tend to be dark and dense, whereas for me, I often think of the the Australian landscape as being light and sun bleached. There’s always a way though and nutting it out is part of the fun. You’ll see in the last panel of this page the characters are walking deeper into the bush where I’ve hopefullly created as sense of ominous foreshadowing by having them appear to walk into a more shadowy environment.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions about my process or work and would like to contact me, please feel free to use to the contact form on this website.

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