New Year, New Project part 2: Friends and neighbors

Here there is a bunch of characters again:

A new project for a new year

Always busy here at Fedzeppelin's place, Sara and I are currently working on a new projet to be showed at the next Festival de la Bande-Dessinnée d'Angoulême hoping we will find a publisher.
At the moment I can't reveal a lot since the project subject is still top-secret, but I can show you at least the characters, so you can tell us if you like'em.
Here we go with the 4 main characters, they will be room-mates in a shared flat somewhere.

Prehistoric ocean wip

Some days ago Ptr asked me some pieces of information about the working process of 'Prehistoric ocean', so I thought it could be nice to share with you all the principal step I took to have this final effect.

So here we go:

1) Layout and pencil drawing:

This is the most important part of my work: the part where I take my pencil, a piece of paper and sketch the idea first, and then I go on refining it till I have a result I am satisfied with:

2) Flat colours:

After I have scanned my illustration I start digital thinking: the first step is to clean up the image, erasing the excess of pencil's scratchs and to define the different areas I'll paint using flat colours:

(I'm sorry for the low quality image, but I just took a screenshot while I was working and don't have better resolution image of this step)

3) Changing outlines' colour and adding volume:

After I decide the colours of the different areas of the illustration I change the colour of the pencil outline into something more similar to the principal colour of every area. Then I use a colour at halfway between the outline new colour and the principal colour and a soft brush to levelout the colours and define the volumes:

 

4) Light and shadows:
Now I have my volumes setted, it's time to put some shadows and light on every element. I usually prefer to define the shadow with a colour (this time blue) using the same for every object in the picture. I draw the light then, it's a bit complicate because you have to use different methods for every different kind of surface: e.g. a stone does not reflect light as a fish's skin does.

5) Textures:
since the setting is ocean dept I tried to obtain a sort of 'sea wave effect', adding a texture:

Happy holidays!

Prehistoric ocean

Some months ago I was asked to provide some sketches to use as backclothes for the University Museum of my hometown. As always happens in this kind of job, some sketches of mine have been used and some others have been rejected.
The next one was one of the rejected ones. The original version consisted only in seaweeds, ammonites and the pliosaurus because the costumer was pretty specific about that, but, once I had my sketch rejected, I felt free to add some turtles and elasmosaurus (even if I'm not so sure elasmosaurus used to pack swim).

Today (well yesterday since it's 1 a.m. now) I was in need of something to digital paint just to keep on training and I decided to paint that old sketch.
Here there is the result:

 

Secret passage

And here there is the painted version, I hope you enjoy :)

Secret passage WIP

A little sketch made in some spare time moments; coming soon in painted version:

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 ;)

Cretaceous landscape

While working at our dossier, I had some other jobs to take care of. 

Here there is a sample of what Fed has been doing during last months: that's a back-cloth for a life-size statue of a dinosaur and its nest that is exposed in the University Museum in my home town.
The task was pretty hard because I had to work on a file that would be printed on a 6X5 m canvas.

The picture portrays a landscape from Cretaceous with plants and trees, so I had to study a bit of paleonthology to be sure I portrait things that really existed in that period; it was hard but definitely interesting.
The whole illustration have been draw in pencil then digitalized and painted using adobe photoshop, now I'm looking forward to see it printed but I have to wait till December 10th: the roll-out day.

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.