The awesome Matt Garvey sent me some variant copies of Gangsters versus Nazis #2. It’s something else to see your work in print, grateful to Matt and Andrea for the opportunity and to anyone who grabbed my cover in the KS campaign, thanks for the support!
The comics machine Matt Garvey kindly asked me to provide a variant cover (my first cover) for the latest issue of Gangsters v Monsters. Look at that preview art by the awesome Andrea Schiavone! So good!
After sketching a few of the characters and initial ideas on paper I worked up a quick cover layout guide in affinity designer and imported the logo files. I then exported the guides to clip studio paint as a draft layer and scanned in some of my loose sketches.
I switched between procreate and clip studio to create the thumbnails, for some reason thumbnailing was just easier in procreate.
I liked all four of these and couldn’t really decide on a favourite, they all would have been fun to draw, honestly.
Initial set of thumbnails with roughly spotted blacks
After receiving confirmation from Matt on the second thumbnail I started inking the mummy head first, followed by the werewolf before tackling the rest. I decided very quickly to limit the brush size to 0.4, 0.8 and 1.0 for consistency. In hindsight I prob went a little overboard with the texture on the mummy in contrast to the other characters.
Rough sketch to final inks in clip studio paint
I haven’t really been colouring much this last year so took a few hours to refamiliarise myself with some basic techniques before flatting the file, practicing on this art from the previous post.
Flatting WIP, lotsa layers, some would say too many
I had a lot of difficulty nailing down my colour palette and worked up some rough options after finishing the flats.
Colour roughs
I coloured this over a few days so decided to create a reference page in clip studio to remind myself of the brushes and combinations used. It was very quick to put together and saved me a good bit of time in the end thankfully.
Colouring brush testsFlats to final colours
I had a blast on this and now that the project has surpassed its goal I’m really looking forward to seeing this in print come December.
Shout off in the comments if you’re getting a copy, I’d love to hear from ya!