I’ve been doing some illustration work for Mateo Diaz’s absurdly lovely Pernicious Albion, and so far it’s producing some of my favourite things I’ve ever drawn, so I’m looking forward to it being an actual thing that I can hold and play and you should be too.
The link above goes to Mateo’s initial concept and content rundown, but follow the label at the bottom of that post to see all the other things he’s posted on the subject.
The illustrations:
Penemue, Mad Angel of Secrets, who taught people writing before it was meant to, and will say hello to you via personally-addressed thousand-year-old dungeon graffiti carved into the walls.
And the Incubus, which is fairly self-explanatory.
They remind me both of “To Kill 6 Billion Demons” (though rather distinctly different) and the “Cultist” Faction of religious robots in Endless Legend (A video game I have been playing far too much of – and which has a strong weird science-fantasy feel).
As always your work is excellent and has a specifically Logan feel – I am curious what your process here is, is this all just pencil with one weight of ink over it and a quick scan, or do you do a lot of digital treatment. Your pieces are very clean and I’m curious how you obtain that (beyond being good at it).
Thanks Gus! The Kill 6 Billion Demons impression is rather flattering because the character design in that is insanely wonderful.
I’ve actually stopped inking my drawings altogether, because I was finding that when I did, I was losing all of the little nuances that made it feel a certain way to begin with and I was left with something flat and sad.
So this is just plain pencils, then when I scan I play with the levels to darken the lines and lighten the paper colour/texture, and then throw it into Photoshop to play with the levels some more and white-out the background.
Sometimes it’ll need a little more manual clean-up or some burn here and there to fix incongruously light bits, but for the most part this is just pencils and level manipulation.
The nice thing about drawing on paper with a decent tooth is that you also get some nice texture and depth without doing any work.
What are those eight things on the Incubus’s arms? It looks like they’re in specific positions (meaning I suspect they’re not sores), and they don’t exactly look like surplus nipples or eyes. So … I am mystified D:
They’re GOOOOOAAT EEEEYYYESS!