reMIND » graphic novel

reMIND cover…maybe.

Jason Brubaker — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:25:00 +0000

Here is, what was until recently, the final cover for reMIND. I really wanted to make Sonja(the girl) showcased on the cover and Victuals(the cat) secondary even though the cat is the main character of the book. The reason is mainly because I thought having a cool chick on the cover of my graphic novel would sell more copies then a precious little kitty picture. I guess to the audience I was trying to hit anyway.

After all I'm going to print this thing hardbound and it needs to sell a few more copies then the guaranteed three to my family. So everyone seemed to like this cover, and there were some who thought that I intentionally placed a cat at the crotch of Sonja to be a sexual innuendo. Well, I'm sorry to deflate your perverse perspective but that was not my thought process here. The linear positioning of the cat, girl, and lighthouse just looks really nice to me and I'd buy this book (I think) if I saw it somewhere, assuming the insides were nice as well.

I held fast to my non-perverted cover for quite a while but then I decided to email Kazu. Yes, I'm talking about the Kazu from the Flight anthology. I was curious what his opinion was about my book and if he had any suggestions. He kindly mentioned that it might go over well with a comic publisher like Image or Dark Horse but he didn't think the cover looked like a children's book in which a book publisher like Random House or Scholastic would be interested.

You see, ever since Jeff Smith started publishing Bone through Random House I've been hooked on this idea that I want to get published by a book publisher, not a comic publisher. It seems to me like Image doesn't care one way or another if you sell your books or not. There's no real effort on their part to push any sales from what I can see. Forgive me if you love Image. That's just my paradigm of the company and I could be totally wrong.

So, recently after talking to a few other people about all this, I've decided to draw a new cover that mainly focuses on the cat in his super suit.(that's not really what it's called) My new cover should focus more on showing off the idea that it's a story about a cat and not a hot chick with a cat.

reMIND – Intro

Jason Brubaker — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

reMIND – Spread 1

Jason Brubaker — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:00:00 +0000

reMIND – Spread 2

Jason Brubaker — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

reMIND – Spread 3

Jason Brubaker — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Page Progression: Thumbnails to a Finished Painted Comic Page

Jason Brubaker — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:50:00 +0000

I hope you enjoy this spread because I thought about it way to much. For a simple comic-page layout, I must have sketched 20 versions before finally satisfied. I had the idea of splitting the cats head into different panels early on and it opened a giant can of worms. You might also notice the greenish red hand behind the cat which was another time-suck for me. I still don’t know how obvious I want this hand to be. At one point I had a shadow on the cats body but that never looked quite right.

On the right side is my ode to Christian Schellewald I guess. You see, I bought his book, LA/SF, at the San Diego Comic Con in 2006 after looking through the entire convention. It was one of the only books that really stood out to me, besides Joshua Middleton’s Sky Between Branches. Schellewald’s book is filled with amazing little guasch paintings and sketches of completely normal things. Mostly streets, airplanes, and palm trees, but with every sketch is an amazing composition and what amazed me most was his use of negative space. Almost an entire panel would be painted white and then the lower third would be a cool tree or something. This really opened my eyes to a few things. One, negative space is a really good thing. And two, the whole guash painting approach is a good thing too. I know what you are thinking right now. This guy can’t write to save his life. I know, I know, I may not be J.K. Rowling when it comes to sharing my thoughts but I sure know when I love an artistic style.
Schellewald’s and Middleton’s books are some of the biggest influences on this graphic novel. Middleton’s sketches on his blog just make my head spin. You might have to dig a little for them but it’s worth it.

Anyway, I loved the negative space idea and as you can see, I wholeheartedly applied it to the right side of this page.

Below are a few of the steps that I had to take to get this finished spread.

A step is missing here where I blew up this thumbnail and printed it on 8.5 x 11 paper and traced over it using tracing paper and a bald point pen.
This is the final line work after blowing it up again and printing it on two sheets of legal paper (8.5 x 14) taped together. I used a light table, bristol board and a mechanical pencil. Scanned to Photoshop, adjusted the contrast and presto.

reMIND – Spread 4

Jason Brubaker — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Comic Coloring – Flatting

Jason Brubaker — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:21:00 +0000

Flatting? What’s that?

For about 3 years now, I’ve been slaving away at my coloring process about as slow as possible. I would spend hours and hours filling between the lines all while throwing textures over everything to see how it might look. I would work on a page for half a day and then just leave it alone for a while. Perhaps I might dream of a better color pallet that night. Or maybe I’ll be able to see something better if I open it up in a week or a month.

One time I actually hired some freelancers from India and Japan to color a test page to see if they could match my style and save me precious time. I gave them specific reference of how I wanted it to look and even examples of the color pallet. I even gave them my homemade texture files.

When I got the pages back they looked…well, lets just say I deleted the files even after revisions so that I wouldn’t be influenced in any way by what I saw. Don’t get me wrong, they did a great job coloring the pages but it wasn’t right for my project. Even though it was far from what I wanted, it was money well spent because it sent me on a quest to figure out more efficient methods of coloring my pages.

Later I thought about hiring one of them to paint all the sections of my pages a flat color on layers so that I could easily adjust it all and add textures and lighting myself. This would save me so much time but how would I explain this crazy concept that, obviously has never been done before, to a guy across the world with a language barrier. Maybe I can pay him less if he’s just PREPARING the files for me, I thought.

I never got around to it. Finishing the line work for the first book was all I could think about. Good thing too. It was only a month ago that I came across a blog in which I learned all about the common practice of comic book flatting. Or to flat out colors.

Flatting is what comic guys call preparing line art for coloring. It’s exactly what I needed the whole time but had no idea what it was called. On top of that, I’m now noticing that EVERYONE ELSE knows what it is. I guess that’s what I get for trying to do a graphic novel all by myself in secret. Here are a few excellent tutorials on flatting.

Tutorial on flatting – BoltCity.com (My personal favorite)
Free flatting plug-in for Photoshop
ProjectWaldo (where I learned about it all)

[edit] If you’re wondering how I outsourced to a few guys on the other side of the world, I talk about that here: Outsourcing.

Here are some images of my process for spread 4.

reMIND – Spread 5

Jason Brubaker — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Outsourcing Comic Pages

Jason Brubaker — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:17:00 +0000

Outsourcing Comics

To start this off, I'd like to say that I'm not trying to promote outsourcing. I'm sure someone will read this and be upset with me for showing a clear cut way to outsource your comic pages causing the American economy to collapse…again. All I'm trying to do here is get my stupid graphic novel finished before I'm to old to draw. Plus I'd rather spend time with my wife and son then flatting a page on the weekends. After all, this isn't my job, it's my personal project/hobby.

Surviving the effects of globalization for an online freelancer?

Now that I've captivated you with that last link, I'll plow forward. The whole idea of outsourcing arose after reading the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book, in itself, is a controversy. I think Tim is a bit of a salesman myself but I did pick up some interesting things from his ramblings.

Outsourcing was one of them. Outsourcing boring, time consuming, or monotonous things that don't need your special attention so you can focus on things you want to do.

The book suggests a few websites that specialize in aggregating freelancers from around the globe. Here are a few of them:

elance.com (what I used)
guru.com

I suggest Elance over Guru. Guru is slow and it's hard to find anyone for a good price. Why would I want to pay someone $75 an hour to flat out my pages. Elance, on the other hand is a pretty fast site to look through and you can find people around the world but it does take some getting use to.

I ended up using a small company of five from India called Dream Computers. They have a few comic coloring samples in their portfolio. Their hourly rate said $15 but after I paid them for my test pages they emailed me back, dropping their page rate to $15 a page for finished coloring. Just so you know, I never used what they colored because it wasn't what I was looking for but I'm thinking about emailing my contact at Dream Computers to show them a flatting tutorial and negotiate a new price. After all I don't want to pay them the same price for flatting a page as I would for finished coloring. My only problem with this method is it seems like you have to spend time and money to get the right freelancer and maybe even teach them what you want them to do.

Even though I can see how this might work out well with the exchange rates, I'm still curious about hiring someone who already knows how to do flats. I mean how much more could it cost to have a professional flatter? But where do I find one?

[Edit] Click here to find out – Outsourcing Comic Flatting – part 2

P.S. I just got reamed the other day about my lousy lettering job in these pages. I promise I will make it all better once I learn to do it right and I'll post what I learn.

[Edit] What I learned – Lettering and Making your own fonts

Here is Spread 5 by the way.

I'm thinking of adding part of a row boat in the bottom left panel foreground. I already redrew Sonja twice and finally asked my wife to pose for me so I could get it right. I worry it looks more realistic then the rest of her frames. And talk about negative space!