I 'complain' that I'm busy a lot. This is mostly because I am often busy. I'm not always busy with art, or with my day job (although of course these two things combined account for the vast majority of my time breathing), but other things as well, like relaxing in front of the TV, trawling Pinterest for references, keeping on top of my messages (in various places), video games, reading, eating, and sleeping. You know, life? It tends to add up. Fairly low on that list of priorities, but still a priority, is writing blog posts.
Phil Sandifer on the other hand, has blog posts as one of his main priorities. Blogging, and subsequently making books from those posts (with many additions and edits of course),
is his day job, so he blogs
a lot.
Previously I've done book covers for his collections based on his still ongoing
TARDIS Eruditorum series of blog posts, and also on the book he wrote about Wonder Woman (
A Golden Thread), which didn't appear on his blog. A series of books and a blog covering every episode and a huge amount of tangential material of the 50 year history of Doctor Who (with some of those episodes being covered in 12,000+ word essays) is not enough for Dr. Sandifer though.
Yes, he actually is a Doctor, in English, and possibly in awesome. A doctorate of awesome would be a useful thing to have, come to think of it, I wonder where you'd get one.
With his blog rapidly approaching the present time of the show he's cast around for something else to cover when he catches up, and found it in the form of the passive feud between writers (and self proclaimed magicians) Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Now I can't pick sides there as I'm an enormous fan of both their works (though not enormous enough to have read everything by them), and Phil doesn't pick sides either. His work is presented as the history of a war distant enough that there are no stakes in the winners. Not dry and dispassionately though, but with a wink and some dry wit and humour. The 'war' is really just a framing device for a vast and sprawling canvas; the actual chapters covering topics as diverse as the influence of J.G. Ballard, Robert R Crumb, and Edward Blake, to the narrative structures of aristotelian literature (and so on), as well as the works, and influence upon them by 'the war', of other writers, such as Neil Gaiman.
It sounds insane. It is insane. The good Doctor is a self proclaimed Mad Man With a Blog after all.
Writing blogs doesn't make money though - as a Day Job it's pretty low income stuff, unless you have a huge and sprawling readership and lots of ads. Phil's blog has minimal ads, and a moderate following among a certain type of intellectual nerd (as well as less intellectual nerds like me, who just like his writing style), so he's
running a Kickstarter to fund it. And since (to paraphrase C3PO) he's worked with me before, he asked me to knock him up a nice banner for the jam-jar shaking.
Still here? Oh good. That may be the longest Cold Open I've ever written, so I hope it was worth the wait. If it wasn't keep going, there's a mid-episode twist a little way down. You can expand the images by clicking on them by the way - I'd recommend it for the one above. And now back to our scheduled programming.
So, I could have just doodled some stuff, slapped a logo on it and called it a day, or thrown together a simple photo montage. There's no challenge in that though, so I immediately thought of doing charcoal portraits. Because I'm such an expert in Charcoal! Right? Ha, hahaha. This was decision was actually before I'd done the
Robots for my son, so it's not like I really had any reason to be confident I could do it. Anyway, he asked in The Time of Ultimate Busyness, so I had to tell him it would be a few weeks, but I'd do something in charcoal. It was a week after that I started on the robots.
Anyway, eventually I sat down and did a preliminary sketch of what was in my head. I had a photo of Alan Moore available, but I wasn't being terribly careful about the accuracy of the sketch. I just wanted to firm up in my head what I wanted. Obviously it's terrible, but it did it's job.
After that I wanted to see if it might be better served as a comic style rendering, so I did it again in a style vaguely reminiscent of Kevin O'Neil (who illustrated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I liked it, but it wasn't going to work for what I wanted, so it was back to the charcoal idea that I was now less sure of, having done the robot pics.
This was my initial pencil sketch of Moore. I used a grid to get the basic proportions and angles of his head right, with the rest of it just being measured with a pencil and a pair of dividers. I'm hopeless at judging angles (as you may have noticed over the years), which was why I resorted to the grid. Cheating? No - but we'll get to that in an
A-Musing post soon enough. Other than his head I used about six different photographs as reference to get the rest of it down. I left the medals blank, intending to put some references on them (such as one of them being a smiley face), but then I forgot completely, and they stayed blank until the end.
I then traced the sketch (with tracing paper - the first time I've used it in, well, since the Robots, but before that long enough that I don't remember using it before), and transferred it to the toned sketch pad that I'd previously drawn robots on. I wish there was some clever technique I could harp on about after that, but really it just boiled down to "Shading it in charcoal," which is fairly boring and not terribly informative. I did try blending the charcoal here and there, and discovered the charcoal I was using was a little firm for it - I've bought softer charcoal since then, so I might try doing it some other time. Also I did relight the picture of Moore I was working in, so all the shadows are a little deeper and he's lit more from the left (our right).
Phil was happy with this, so when I had the chance I did the same thing for Grant Morrison. Here's the pencil sketch. This was done in exactly the same way, with the only real difference being that I only used two references for his body (one of them being from a publicity still of a popular UK drama, so less said about that the better - I did change it a bit though). I also drew his eye a little large - this is after I scaled it down slightly, but really, unless you were looking for it you wouldn't notice the difference it was that slight.
The actual shading didn't go as well though. I tried to relight him the same way I had for Moore, but overdid under his eyes a bit (okay, a lot). This looked fine on paper, so I fixed it with fixative and then scanned it in, but after doing so the darkness there was just overbearing. I couldn't just erase the black, since I'd fixed the charcoal, and I didn't want to do it digitally or the whole point of having an actual original for a change would be lost. My solution was to grab a Prisamcolor white pencil (waxier than a charcoal one, which I thought would be advantageous) and gently run it over the top of the fixed charcoals. This took a couple of attempts, but as you can see it eventually worked fairly well.
Here's the finished Grant Morrison picture. I think it's less of a likeness than the Moore one, but still recognisable. Next time I do something like this I'm going to stick with the lighting in the original picture, I swear.
By the way, you may recall me lamenting a long time ago that my scanner had a tendency to skew things when I scanned them, but that I had no proof that this was the case rather than my just drawing things a little off and not being able to tell on paper. Well, now I know. This picture had a border around it so I could accurately judge the scale. The border was a perfect rectangle, but when I scanned it, well, it wasn't. Thankfully Photoshop has a distort tool that allowed me to get it back to the correct shape, but that's certainly something I'll have to keep an eye on in future as I won't always have such a defined guideline for straightening it back up.
After that I just needed to do the banner itself. This meant placing the two scanned pictures next to each other, adding a logo and making it all look a little aged. The aging and compositing was done in Photoshop of course, with the paper's aging done with a combination of textured overlays and custom brushes (I'll have to share those at some point, a great set for wear and tear). Above is the first pass, and, if you scroll up and down between this and the final one at the top there, you'll see that the logo changed a bit between here and there, as well as the banner proportions being changed. Most of the extra stuff on the logo is just done with a combination of traced paths and victorian style clipart. I could have done the flourishes, but time was short. Other than that the 'in' was changed because neither of us liked it in this version. The border in the final was also done partially with clip art, which saved some time, even though it wouldn't have been terribly difficult to have done that without.
And that's it - the ridiculous and slightly roundabout route to a relatively simple Kickstarter banner.
Oh.... But there's
more.
Going back a bit to when Phil first asked for the banner, and my first communication with him on it, he'd also mentioned doing an E-Book cover for the individual chapters he releases as he goes along. One that might do double duty of the first printed volume too. You can see the end result above, but here's a brief explanation at how it was arrived at.
Before I got to working on the Alan Moore charcoal image, I took some time in between drawing Robots to do some mockups. My initial inclination was to just use the Kickstarter images (which didn't exist at this point), or painted versions of the same (either digital or actual paint - I hadn't really thought enough about it to decide either way). To that end I included some actual portraits from the Boer War and First World War as placeholders (I think it's Field Marshal Sir Frederick Roberts and Major General Sir Andrew Russell as the stand ins there, though names of peers can get a little strange, so I might be a bit off).
They were all looking like fairly reasonable "History of the War" type designs; the sort of thing you see in the reduced price sections of Barnes and Noble, and also boring as shit. I decided to mix it up a little with what I was thinking for the Kickstarter banner, and what I know of Phil's general preferences, and added a little Victoriana and whimsy to the affair. Newspaper, Periodical, Propaganda, that sort of thing.
When I did the boxing one I had an inkling that it would be the one he'd pick, but I did a couple extra just to be on the safe side. Reshuffled the results a little to fit a better format frame (originally they were in two rows) and sent them off to the Doctor. He did of course pick the boxing poster.
From there it should have been a simple case of rescaling the thumbnail, adding new images of the boxers and redoing the grime, as all the text and the Union Jack* were fonts or vectors. In other words, I could make the text and flag as big as I wanted with no loss in quality, but the rest had to be done manually. Didn't work out that way though. I don't have a copy of the version I just scaled up, but at the larger size the text just wasn't working, and the whole thing was a little bland.
To fix this I went through each bit of text, and sought out a better typeface for each. Sometimes I'd find a perfect typeface, but I'd need to embellish it a bit to fit with the sensational nature of the poster. I'd also add a little "bleed" to the red and blue, as if the inks hadn't come quite so perfectly off the presses. It's subtle, and hard to see at all on the e-book,but it might read well enough if it ever sees print.
In actuality posters like this didn't really start appearing until the early 20th century as far as I can tell (shortly after World War 1), and of course the styles of text and such had changed drastically by then, so I combined the layouts and styles of Victorian playbills with the spectacle and portraits of the later boxing posters. I think it looks fairly authentic, even if it's an enormous anachronism.
As before with the kickstarter banner, the weathering came from scans, images found online and custom brushes. The stain is mostly modern paper stained with tea. The fading of the colours and black ink is done partly with photoshop filters, and partly with some photographs of stained concrete I took a while back. More clipart here too, in the shape of the filigree under "presents" and the leaf-like swirls around "This Event" and "Albion". The original hands pointing to "presents" here were clipart, but I swapped them out for some I drew in the final version.
All that was left to do after all that was to add the fighters. This was simple enough; just find two pictures of victorian boxers, and draw them with vague likenesses of the combatants for their heads. No measuring or anything for these, I just sketched them in my sketchbook and then inked them with a thin pen. I was careful to keep the shading to horizontal lines only, for a slightly more Victorian feel (I usually use a lot of crosshatching when I ink). I filled in my Alan Moore illustration before scanning, but for Grant Morrison I was lazy (because there is more shadow) and added the solid blacks in Photoshop after scanning. The image above is the original line art as I scanned it.
And that really is all. Eventually I'll need to do a back cover to go with it, and I might tweak the front some more while I'm about it. Unlike the TARDIS books these will all have the same simple design for the back covers and spines, giving me more time and energy to go a little crazy on the front ones of the series. What will the next one entail? Only time will tell, and it might be a while before I have to think about it terribly hard.
You can back the
Last War in Albion Kickstarter
here, With more information about the currently available chapters over on
Philip Sandifer's blog.
*Or Union Flag, if you want to be pedantic. It's not a flag though, it's a symbol of a flag on a screen, and since it's neither flying on a building or on a ship I can call it what I bloody well like.
