#05 cover

I was so undecided on the overall lighting for this cover I ended up making a day and a night version. This is one of the day versions, the rest had varing amounts of light and smoke effects. Yeah. I got silly with it, had way too much fun with the fire hahaha.

Y'know.. Sometimes I get paranoid on how muddy this might turn out in print. I try to crank up the levels and saturation as much as I can without destroying what I got. But maybe I should just work on my overall colour pallete.. Sigh.

Coming June 25th.
Diamond order code: APR084085

Night scenes are hard.

I know I said I was looking foward switching up the colour pallete on issue 5... Trying to paint a bunch the way I usually did with day scenes has been difficult so far. Unless there's a definitive light source like the moon or a torch I could dish out some extra visual contrast.

Not on the pages I'm on right now. Imagine huddling under the shade of a tree in a dark forest in the middle of the night with the campfire out. I'm staring at the monitor and musing how it's no wonder that filmmakers and animators had such a hard time doing night scenes.

Wrapping my brain around how to go about making this work without the pages coming out so dark the pencils couldn't be seen.

Which reminds me...

A friend recently sent a copy of some scanned issues of Neozoic that a group has been distributing online [along with a ton of other titles by the big two and such]. Kinda cool to hear someone was interested in spreading the word about Neozoic and all, but I couldn't help but notice how dark the scans were. [Was that intentional?]

In any case, if anyone out there actually went and downloaded a scan of Neozoic, hopefully it's enough for them to go get it in print. There's one incentive I can think of really: because the original looks better.

Issue 5 progress | Cover roughs

So far it's been a little slow, my nerves are a little frayed from losing a week over fixing computer problems, one of which involved my foot and the powerbar.

[Click for mini-rant ▼]
It's one thing to scan and purge whatever virus or ad/spyware was hiding on the hard drive but man... The Bamboo Fun driver issues popped up to give me the "please reinstall tablet" prompt, adding to the lag the system idle process was causing on the side. The chugging was so loud I swear my computer was groaning in agony. Stopped trying to tough it out when programs began closing in on themselves, particularly while I was saving my work. After pulling my best Hulk impression for having to redo a double page spread three times, I finally nailed down the colours for the first 3 pages.

I chillaxed a bit this morning to play some Patapon on the PSP. Damned theme song is stuck in my head, but awesome game nonetheless. Great way to pass the time while Photoshop files are saving.

Issue 5 takes place at night so I was able to use a lot of purples and blues for once. Brushing up on fire effects right now since there might be a lot of torch lighting going on. Orange rim lighting here we come!

While I'm mulling over lighting options for the rest of the book, feel free to check out the rough layouts for all the Neozoic covers [1-5] so far:



[Still haven't seen 10 000 BC, I think I'll have to take a raincheck on that for now.]

Red 5 at the Eagle Awards?!

According to the list of all the nominees, the names of the guys behind Atomic Robo are on plenty of the categories. Let's see what we've got:

Wegener up for best new artist
Clevinger up for best new writer
Red 5 Comics up for best publisher
Atomic Robo up for best new comic
Atomic Robo up for best comic hero

Technically speaking you could enter in the name of a new nominee, and if there are multiple entries for said nominee by other interested parties, then the name goes on the list.

Allow me to get to the point.

It's a bit short notice since voting closes Mar. 22, which is like a couple weeks away, if any of you guys out there really liked the work that the Neozoic crew have been putting out, feel free to stick our names in there as well.

The comic biz is a tough place for new publishers like Red 5, hopefully the work we put out so far is incentive enough for people to give us a chance.

Spread the word, spread the love.