Neill Cameron is no stranger to the blog – I think we first spoke with him several years back when he was working on the great Bulldog Empire adventures with his partner in crime Jason Cobley. The second wave of graphic novel collections from the DFC Library is hitting shelves this autumn and among them is Neill’s own DFC strip, Mo-Bot High, so it seemed the perfect time to ask Neill to give us a “director’s commentary” on making the Mo-Bots: expose one artist to far too much Japanese pop comic culture, feed him atomic sushi, inject saki directly into his brain, make him fight some giant robot monsters then prop him up in front of some drawing material and let him go!
Since Joe asked so nicely, here is a little behind-the-scenes peek into the horribly convoluted and mind-wearying way in which I go about creating a page of Mo-bot High!
We start with some rough-to-the-point-of-being-functionally-unintelligible thumbnails. The page we’re looking at here comes from the second season of the strip in the DFC, and by this point I was pretty much writing-by-thumbnailing, rather than writing a full script first. I found this made the action flow a lot better and let me loosen up with the layouts a bit. And I think my editors could just about follow it. Or if not, they humoured me with impeccable tact and grace.
We then move to ‘pencils’, although these are actually done digitally in Manga Studio. These are still really quite rough-looking, and I would certainly never consider this an acceptable level of finish on an actual pencilling job, but I knew I’d be inking this myself. By this point I was pretty comfortable drawing the characters and robots, and my editors seemed to trust that I knew what I was doing, so these rough scribbles were good enough to take to the next stage.
(Above: from pencils to inks to the final stage, all art by and (c) Neill Cameron)
Inking! Again, I ink digitally in Manga Studio. I actually use lots of separate layers for the inks, inking all the different elements such as characters, mo-bots, backgrounds and special effects on different layers. This lets me apply different effects and colour treatments to the artwork at the colouring stage, and so makes things easier in the long run, although it can get horribly complicated. I think this page is about as complex as it ever got, as there’s so many different elements going on – Asha, the mo-bots, the transformation effects as she mo-bots up, the interface screen stuff that appears around her mobot, and so on. I often find myself drawing something on the wrong layer for a while without realising – haven’t really come up with solution to that yet, other than ‘try not to be so stupid’.
Colours! I export the Manga Studio file into Photoshop and colour it there. Again, the colouring for all the elements is on separate layers, but I haven’t shown examples here, preferring to skip ahead to the finished version as… well, as frankly I’m rather embarrassed to show how complicated I make things for myself.
Lettering! One of the changes I had to make in preparing the page for the collected edition was to go through and re-letter everything so the lettering was all in flat black on a separate layer, for ease of swapping it out for foreign editions. I was a bit worried about this, as I’d originally used all kinds of colouring and effects on the lettering, but I think it ended up working pretty well and probably actually reads better now. There are a few other changes in the collected version – bits where I took the opportunity to polish up the art a bit, and a super-exciting NEW ENDING, but the one change I kind of regret is the loss of the ‘Previously on Mo-Bot High’ and ‘Next Week’ narration at the top and tail of each episode. Obviously it reads better as a single story without them, but I genuinely think those little bits were some of the funniest writing I’ve ever done. Y’know, for whatever that’s worth.
That’s about it! Gosh, I feel exhausted just describing it all. How I ever actually drew this thing, I’ve no idea. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed drawing it! Or preferably, more.
October 29th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
”I often find myself drawing something on the wrong layer for a while without realizing – haven’t really come up with solution to that yet, other than ‘try not to be so stupid’.”
Try locking the layer you don’t want to draw on. Problem is you have to keep reminding yourself to do it!