Retrospect on issue #01

When I first started colouring Neozoic, the writer Paul Ens asked me to try emulating the look on Korim's concept art, which was all very loose and sketchy, a little dodge and burn-y. So in response, I made a bunch of scratchy brushes and did a very rough semi-cellshade-ish render of the test page he gave me.

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He liked the look and I stuck with that and began refining the style for the other pages. All in all, Paul's been pretty good with his responses; anything longer than one word usually meant I've got something to fix or tweak. For instance, there have been some revisions where certain areas of the pages needed to be brighter, or "brighter-er" to better reflect the mood depicted in the script.

In fact, that's exactly what I named some of those edits.

There were some characters like Kyni and Bovi that I had to come up with colour schemes from scratch because the original sketches were monochromatic. A few of those can be found on the back of issue 1. Me personally I dug the original concept for Lilli Murko. Scars on a smoking hot sword-slinging babe, especially on her face, screams character. [I'm a sucker for badassery, what can I say?]

Took 16 days to finish colouring 24 pages plus the cover. Was late by 2 days but at least Troy, our letterer, had the bulk of the book to work with while I was chipping away at the remaining pages. I had been contacted to work on the book while I was doing post production for my grad film at Sheridan College, so as soon as I had finished it up and graduated and moved back home, the first thing I did when I got in the door was fire up the computer and opened up Photoshop. Fun times, no really.

It had been years since Korim and I got to work together on a comic, getting back into the groove was a bit rough at first but once we hit the right notes we went on like a rolling stone. The experience overall had been intense, and I was very happy to hear that the people who had reviewed the book enjoyed the artwork.