EDITOR'S NOTE: I received the following as a paid subscriber to writer/artist Gary Scott Beatty's Substack page. This article provides great insights into the creative process and is so good it's a shame not to reach even more viewers. So, I wrote to Gary and requested permission to share it with my blog readers. If you like what you see, please check out Gary's Substack page, and view his various published offerings at Strange Horror website. And, don't forget to read the free webcomic, Gods of Aazurn: Gary Scott Beatty - Substack
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A Wild Night and a New Road
Welcome, new bonus subscribers! Below I broke down the illustration process for this page one splash from Strange Horror #1.
Let me know in the comments if this is the kind of thing you'd like to see for bonus paid content! Of course, as a paid subscriber, you also are able to read the every chapter of the Gods of Aazurn saga in order.
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Above, the inks. I use Clip Studio Paint for inking over crude thumbnails -- photo collages and sketches so ugly I will not subject you to them here. Basically I draw while I'm inking.
The inks then go into Photoshop, as pictured. I use the inking layer at the top for a "holds" layer in case I want to break into the black line with color, and keep a spare at the bottom in case I screw it up.
You can see two layers at the bottom that are strictly for quickly selecting areas to color and have nothing to do with the final look.
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The title of this is taken from a letter written by American poet Emily Dickinson in 1869 to a friend about death.
“It grieves me that you speak of Death with so much expectation. I know there is no pang like that for those we love, nor any leisure like the one they leave so closed behind them, but Dying is a wild Night and a new Road.”
Death in a Tuxedo appears in my illustration with a number of strange companions. I like the thought of readers trying to figure out what they are and why they are there.
A fun part of this composition is that readers are looking at the page from the view of the body laying there. Death is talking to us -- and also to the corpse.
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Finally, some color! This is my base palette. Layers above are for adjustment and punch, like the “more blue” and “shadow” layers above subtle enough I won't bore you with them.
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A “blue wash” layer recedes the background into the back. This is similar to when I was painting in decades past, using washes like the old master painters to pull colors together.
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Highlights, background highlights and some detail shadows.
A subtle "texture" layer, 50% in overlay mode, on the ground. A moon I painted long ago from a NASA image dropped into the moon space at 63% in luminosity mode. It's done!
I have lettered comic pages in Adobe Illustrator since the late '80s. I love the sharpness and control.
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For some reason I've gotten more comments and questions about these little frog guys than anything I've ever done. They're simply there for composition purposes, I needed something in that space. Why not frogs in Renaissance costume?
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Next week's Bonus Paid Subscriber Content: the story of a splash page of mine that actually ended up hanging in an art museum.
In glorious service to our Aazurn overlords,
Gary Scott Beatty
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If you're new here and forgot why you subscribed, I'm Gary Scott Beatty, author and/or illustrator of several fine genre fantasy books, including Wounds, Jazz: Midnight, Worlds . . . and, Bleeding Cool claims, one of the best indie comics of 2014: Number One. Add garyscottbeatty@substack.com to your address book and these won't be branded as sp7m-robot generated evil. If you enjoy these ramblings, feel free to send friends to StrangeHorror.com so they can become indoctrinated into the temple of Aazurn.
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