Famine's Shadow

This winter I was contacted by horror writer Rachel Deering (Anathema) to do work on a graphic novel. That is still in the works, but in the meantime, I did a short story for a future anthology called In the Dark. Rachel wrote a great 12 page script for me, and being the fan of short stories that I am, I gladly tried my hand at it...

Character sketches. Famine went through a redraw. In the original script, she was supposed to be naked...but naked hunched over old ladies is a little too horror-show for me. XD

Some page layouts. I usually do these on graph paper so I can construct the panels with an underlying grid. I find this helps me to keep pages readable. I also try to get down my black reference at this stage, so I'll know where all the heavy shading will be when I ink.

I try to work out most of the drawing in the pencil stage, though I will do some final tweaking as I ink.

The fellas at South Fellini were kind enough to help me put together a video of me inking page 6. As you ca see, my inks are all done by hand (even the boarders), mostly with a brush. I used a combination of Chinese painting brushes and watercolor brushes on these pages. Sorry to anyone who isn't a Cephalic Carnage fan. I know that jazz fusion grindcore isn't a very popular genre, but it's usually what I listen to while I work.

And here's that page I was inking.

I wanted to keep a simple, limited color palette for this story. I was able to achieve some nice gradients and shading using halftones and very subtle textures.

This story will be coming out in the In the Dark andthology, published by IDW!