MerMay 11 Steampunk Periophthalmus argentilineatus

Periophthalmus argentilineatus is a little fish a.k.a mudskipper because of its habit of go out the water and spend some time in the mud. For this peculiar fish I imagined a steampunk mermaid and drawed it in crayons, pantone, and coffee spreaded by a make-up brush since in my new home I didn't brought my watercolour brushes at the moment.

Pencil pages from La Montagne d'Ambre

In nostalgic mood today... proper time to share some old page in pencil version from La Montaigne d'Ambre: my most beloved unpublished work.

What are monsieur Les Rennes and Joel speaking about? Probably we'll never know.

La Montagne d'Ambre sample pages

How long is that I don't share some pages? 

Quite a lot I guess. Here some samples from the last version of La Montagne d'Ambre, incindentally, the double one is my favorite page.

As usual the inking was made by the wonderful Sara Cappoli.

Speaking about old characters...

I know, he looks a lot like Mr.K. but it's not my fault if I love to draw this kind of face.

Doc Al Fraser keeps on jumping in my mind from time to time, I guess it's simply that I don't give up the fact that The Amber Mountain, the project setted in Madagascar, will not be published.

Re-designing old characters: Mr.K

I'm thinking to re-edit the old project Le secret de l'Horloge, this could be a good option for Mr.K (you can see the previous version here, scrolling to the last character).

Disclaimer, someone suggested me a couple of new names for Mr.K.: Gonzalo Patadepalo or Lalo Patapalo, given that I'm not going to use those names for this character, I'm thinking to recycle them to a new one... stay tuned.

In the meanwhile, please, let me know if you like this new version of Mr.K.

Gun WIP

And there we are with the step by step process for the Girl with a Gun I posted some days ago.
 

1) as usual the start point is the pencil drawing on common print paper.

2) Cleaning up the illustration: after I scanned it and opened the file with adobe photoshop I start ereasing all the pencil line in excess and all the grey shadows. I'm afraid I forgot to take a screenshot of the final result after the clean up, but you should easily imagine it, it's like the image above but more tidy ;)

3) The flat colour part. It's when I choose what palette I'll use to create the atmosphere I had in my mind while I was designing. I simply fill up the different areas with a colour shade that will be a sort of halfway between the darkest colour I'll use for the shades and the lighter colour I'll use for the birght points.

4) Colouring the lineart. I simply change the colour of the whole lineart making it more similar to the base colour of the area. It's a little detail but the image looks quite different.

5) Volumes time: with a soft brush I try to armonize the lineart with the base flat colour and, while doing it, I try to make the image a bit more tridimensional casting shadows according to the volumes as the figure was under a neutral light source.

6) Shadows. I simply paint the shadows according to the lightsource I chose. I usually paint the shadow with a colour (dark green-brown in this case) to suggest the idea of the kind of light is shining in the picture. After I painted the shadows I set the layer on 'multiply' and low the opacity.

7) Light. Now it's time to add some light spots, I go on using the soft brush and paint with a bright colour the spots where the light goes, I try to be consistent with the different materials (i.e. the light has a different effect on humas skin than on the fabric) but I don't always suceed.

8) Final atmosphere. That's the final part of my work: I simply add some detalis like the wallpaper and give a stronger light.

I hope you enjoyed the work in progess process :)

Disclaimer: I summarised a lot, but I usually work the steps 5, 6 and 7 on an area at time, starting a new area once the previous one is complete but it was simpler to explain this way.

Gun colour

This is the final result, in the next days I'll post the wip :)

Gun

Working on a new illustration which I will share the work in progress of.
This is the first step: pencil on common paper.

Two external inspirations this time: I took the ideas of hat and hairdressing here : https://it.pinterest.com/pin/505880970619728007/ while the gun looks a bit like the wonderful steampunk gun Luca made for me some yeras ago.

Some sketches again

And here there are some sketches again. Characters will come soon, very soon, and pieces of information will come with them, but now it's still time for some background preparatory work.

Hut -sketch

Hi there!
It's a very hard working time here at Fedzeppelin's place, I and Sara are working on a new steampunk project. You'll have some detalils and some new characters soon but in the meanwhile here there is a sketch for one of the backgrounds.
I hope you enjoy.

Page 27 WIP 2: pencil

Very busy period at Fedzeppelin's place. I've just the time to drop here the second part of the WIP.
As you can see, something has changed from the layout page and I can assure you: it always happens.
Hope you enjoy.

Page 27 WIP: layout

Here I go again, after a very long time.
I'm sorry but it took a while to recover and I've got a bit of flu still. Anyway here I am back to work and to this blog. I'll update you all about what happened in France, as soon as I have some proper news to share, in the meanwhile I'm back to the steampunk project. I've to draw a couple of pages, so I thought it would be nice to show the whole creative process.
Are you ready?
Very well: here there is Page 27 Layout.

The layout is the first step a drawer makes when he (or she) have to project a page.

Of course, before there is a script: a page where the author writes what will happen in every panel of the page. Sara wrote the script for me with all the datas and reccommendations and dialogues, but I'll not share it because it's in Italian (and somehow in a sort of 'code language') and it would take a long time to translate it.

Anyway here there is the layout. You can see that at this point the draw is not so accurate, somewhere not even proper, that's because it's a sort of quick sketch of the page, it's useful to see how the page will look like at the end of the work, and to decide how the areas will be filled.

Dossier's cover and title

Some translation's revisal still to do, but our dossier is ready to go now. So it's time to unveil the title of our project. You can see it on the cover I and Sara made together.
The idea was to give te cover a look like some ancient papier with a touch of modern, we wanted to show all the main characters and the centre of our story that is the watch in the picture.
I hope you enjoy :)

By the way, there sill be another page sooner or later, so stay tuned ;)

K-17

No more pages, but we still go on with the preparatory works for our project. Here there is the steampunk wreck vehicle I told you about.
This is the 'car' designed and created by our Mr K. who, in the meanwhile, has gained a proper name and is, in fact, mr Keppeln now (if you don't know who mr K is, please check the last character of the page here).

So, ladies and gentlemen, behold the magnificence of Keppeln-17 aka K-17 (I guess that the 16 prototipes before that had simply exploded).

The K-17 is a glorious two seats vehicle composed of pieces of this or that device: the driver's seat is an old armchair, the passenger's one is a wicker chair with a nailed belt and a tin-plated footstool. The front wheel is a bike wheel while the rear ones are presumably taken by a wagon. The shafts are pipes. The bodywork is composed of pieces of several devices like boilers' doors and tin-plates. The motor is composed of two big boilers and a complicate system of pipes. The handlebars ends with a control knob at one side and with a tap at the other. The headlight is a gas-lamp and last but not the least, the K-17 has a gorgeous polyphonic horn composed of three small trumpets.

I hope you like it just like Sara did, in fact her comment had been: "what a disgraceful banger!"

About me... well, I'm looking forward to draw our Mr. Keppeln running around the city with this miracle of steampunk engineering.

Page 34

Latest update about our dossier: this should be the last coloured page, we will draw another couple of them but they will stay in their pencil version.

This one had been very hard to me because of the copious light-spots in the same big panel in the centre, but I am quite satisfied this time and of course the gorgeous ink-work by Sara Cappoli made the whole page look a lot better than the pencil version as always.

Hope you enjoy, while I can finally come back to my preparatory works for a pure steampunk wreck vehicle to be seen soon (or so I hope) on these pages.

The other pages for the dossier are here, here and here

The latest characters

And we are almost at the end of the line: our dossier is almost ready now, we just need a couple of last things and a good review of the French version of our script and our plot and we'll be ready to run ;)

So, while we are working on the latest details, here there are the character design studies of the left characters. You've seen one of them in pages 1 and 2, the others will not appear in the dossier's finished pages, but they will be drawed in the pencil-version pages we will put in the dossier, so I don't know if we will share them in this blog. Anyway they are still to draw so it's an untimely question at the moment.

Now, here we go, Mesdames et Messieurs please welcome...

Herr Schmidt

You have maybe seen him in pages 1 and 2 even if that was a younger and two eyed version (the first pages of our work are a flash-back).

He is the kick-side of our evil, despicable Herr Moser. Schmidt is not a smart guy but he's totally dangerous all the same.

A little trivia: at first we wanted to make him look like a dear friend of us (as we did with Moser), but we did a couple of preparatory works and decided for something more Zorro's fatty Sergeant Garcia alike and we found a pretty good inspiration in Pollaponk's "No prejudice" music video.

Hinz

Andreas Hinz is the key of all our story: he is the old and slightly mad jail-cell mate of Julien. He is a good guy with a sad story (and a pure steampunk robotic arm) and he is the one whose secrets would put Julien in deep troubles.

Mr K.

No, ok, this is NOT the real name of this character, it's just the way Sara and I call him in our conversations since he his still a character with no name. That is because he was totally unforseen.

There is a funny story behind this character, but, to tell that short, we needed a character for a walk on role and we had a pretty exact idea of how he should look like. So I tryed to make a preparatory work but I wasn't in the mood for drawing feet (that's a part I always hate draw) so I decided to give him a robotic leg. At the end of the day this robotic-legged version looked so cool that our Mr K deserved to become one of our main characters. We worked again on our script and here there is, the only thing he needs now is a proper name. But, no need to tell, he is my favourite character so far ;)

Beautiful ink art is by Madame Sara Cappoli as always.

Page 2

And here there is the last page I and Sara worked on.

That should be page 2, so it comes close after this one.

Hope you enjoy :)

How did I spent last Monday?

That's the answer:

Updates part 2

And here there is another page. Well, actually it's the page number 1.

Hope you enjoy. As usual Sara has made a gorgeous ink work.

This is the third one we finished, maybe you missed the others, please check them here if you're interested.

Updates

Still working working working... I came here just to let you know I am still ok, even if not very active on the internet. I will come back soon I hope, in the meanwhile let me share with you the results of those hard-working days.
Here there are page 32 and page 42 in their full colours. At the moment I am working on page 2 while Sara is inking page 1; we will finish them, then another couple of pages more and we will have all the samples we need; then it will be a matter of crossing fingers and hoping hard.
But, for the moment, enjoy our first two kids (as usual, ink art is by Sara Cappoli):