Samantha and Jake in the office.
Here is a scan (click to embiggenate) of a character study I did many moons ago of the primary protagonists of Fury and the Demon.
It’s roughly poster-sized, mostly because I like working large. I find the standard Blueline comic boards absurdly small, and I am simultaneously mystified and amazed that artists get the level of detail seen in published books into those teeny tiny pages.
I wanted to create a generic image of the two detectives in the office, and decided to use a fisheye effect (that sort of mostly works). My pencils were inked, once again, by the incomparable Tom Benham.
After this was complete, I scanned it—in three chunks, as I recall, which were then digitally stitched together—so I could color it in. Unfortunately, soon after, I started work on the comic book itself and the final version of this image was never finished. I was thinking of attaching my titles to the top and placing a tagline at the bottom: “We all have inner demons. Hers came out.” Semi-clever, I guess. It would have been a nice poster to sell alongside the comic.
I did a couple of isolated color tests in Painter, which I’ve included below. I spent a lot of time dithering about how intense the colors should be and how much texture I should use (in the clothing, for instance. Did I want a painterly look with brush strokes, or something more airbrushed? I don’t think I came to satisfactory answer, but in the end it was a fun experiment.
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- Samantha
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- Jake