Walking With Strangers

If you’ve read the descriptions of any of my previous art pieces, you’ll notice that I’ve been trying to discover a style to use in an upcoming sci-fi/fantasy graphic novel trilogy. And with each new post, I feel like I’ve been getting closer to that style. What you’re looking at now is partially the outcome of all that testing. Although this piece isn’t from the previously mentioned trilogy, it is a book that I’ll be releasing first.

As you can see, it’s called Vestigia. This artwork is actually the cover for the graphic novel. The tone of this graphic novel will be that of a scary children’s book – with inspiration taken from the video game Limbo, Edward Gorey, Tim Burton, Adventure Time, and who knows what else.

I tried something totally new here… Instead of blocking in dark areas with a solid fill, I used a skinny brush tip and drew countless scribbles to fill in larger areas. What I liked about this, was the little bits of light that came through where I “missed” filling in. By the time I got around to coloring the inside pages of Vestigia, I ended up choosing to fill in the solid areas, and there is a story-related reason for that.

The complete Vestigia book is in full color. The inside pages are colored in a style very similar to the cover. I started out by coloring in the entire book as grayscale, then I went back in with color overlays. To achieve this look, I mainly used the Soft Light layer style in Photoshop. And because I kind of fell in love with the black and white look as I was doing it, I thought I’d offer that version for purchase too. I’m going to keep those as a convention exclusive though, and they’ll only be available to buy directly from me at my exhibitor table.