Huzzah and the Big Baby of Death.

I made my third contribution to Huzzah!! recently. After what Rob had the Baron say in this panel, I wondered what could possibly 'kill death itself'. I thought it may be that the sibling infant was the opposite of death and if it came into contact with the big baby 'o' death (BBOD) something interesting might happen. Having the BBOD ingest its sibling meant I could get a joke out of it and refer back to when the Baron rescued the infant from Xog. It also was an excuse for me to have a go at drawing beams of light shooting out of an evil child.

Hmmm, reading that last paragraph back to myself only confirms my suspicions that talking about Huzzah!! and what's happening in it makes you sound like a gibbering loony.

I've been slowly building up to doing the maximum allowed of 3 tiers per page, per Huzzah!! so this is the first whole page I've drawn although it's actually spread out over two pages as the first panel is the last panel of page 26. Here's the roughs I knocked up in Manga Studio. Everything was done in Manga Studio this time around. Occasionally, I might use a bit of Photoshop as well but there wasn't a whole lot of colouring to do seeing as there's so much solid black. I fancied the idea that the BBOD had been given some toys to play with and the fact that he'd just learned to speak meant alphabet building blocks, of course!





























I went with the fairly rough pencils and decided I'd wing it a bit. Not sure if that was a good idea as I wasn't very confident throughout the making of this page, it took ages to finish, much longer than I expected and I was late in posting it. Lots of black with almost no backgrounds would lead you to think there'd be less drawing involved, that it'd be easier to get done, but it didn't work out that way for me with this page.

Next, the final art, put together as a whole page, that's how I drew it and worked on it but to see it in context, visit Huzzah!!

Dead Pets - Sample Piece

Before being given the go ahead to start, I did a sample piece to give a general idea of how the strip might look. The characters changed a little from this initial piece, Frazzle the cat, in particular. Part of this piece was used for the Doodler section on the inside of the Comic in the same issue as the first episode of Dead Pets. Here's the pencil roughs, I can't remember but it looks like I might have drawn them over an even rougher scribble that I printed out very faintly as a guide.



These are the more finished pencils, I was definitely drawing over a blue printout of the previous picture here.


The line art, inked with a Kuretake brush pen, which I may write a little something about in a future post.


And the finished art - I coloured it and added the window shadow on the computer. It was while doing this sample that I realised I didn't want to have the dead pets slightly or semi-transparent but to suggest their lack of solidity by having their linework in colour - apart from a few details here and there - and no shadows cast on them or by them. There is a shadow on Gus the snake in this picture but I was still working out what the rules were at this point. I'm still unsure as to whether my ideas to make them seem ghostly are entirely successful but I didn't want to go down the see-through route, it would have been a pain to deal with technically and far too time-consuming. Not that doing colour holds on the linework of the pets is a speedy process either, as I've discovered.