Thursday 27 March 2014

DKSid - The illustration + design of Damian K. Sheiles

I've been absent of late from my blog and social media... here's why.

Presently, I've been juggling several projects at once. I'm working on material for my graphic novel, plus several cover style illustrations, a limited poster design for a band plus a 24 page promotional book called DKSid which I intend to present to Chris Ryall and ted Adams, the guys from IDW Publishing while they're here for the Supanova Pop Culture Expo this June.


DKSid will be a mini portfolio that showcases my design and illustration style(s). It will be a compilation of one-off cover style illustrations, plus two short comic strips of approx 27 panels each. I'm sure it will evolve as work progresses and new/better ideas come to me.

Below is an advance look as two WIP pages. I'll post more as they are finished. As always, any comments or feedback is welcome.

Page one from a 4 page, 28 panel short story called META

Nine untitled illustrations - CURVES.
...
Damian K. Sheiles

Wednesday 5 March 2014

Lady Tron wants to fight you on the Grid!

I simply love the design of Tron. It's such a fun environment to work in so it was with much relish and enthusiasm that I created the following piece of art: Ladytron - Bring on the Disk Wars!

For those that don't know, Ladytron is a comic character created by comics mage, Alan Moore along with artists extraordinaire Travis Charest in the pages of Wildstorm's Wildcats comic book series. Ladytron is an angst driven, anarchic, narcissistic cyborg with a criminal past and a perfect candidate to fight it out on the grid. For the purpose of this amalgam piece of art, I wanted to play up the Tron aspect of the character's name so I developed a little logo for Lady TRON.

Lady TRON logo
I started out with an initial character sketch (pencil on A4 paper) to work out the pose and over all design of the figure. With Lady Tron, I went through 4 revisions before getting the pose and design to work, adding more detail as I went from version to version.
Revision 4 sketch

Version 4 colour
I created a blue line version of the above sketch which I inked, scanned and coloured in Photoshop. It was at this stage that I realised the character was way too masculine and that the arms weren't quite working as I'd hoped. As I had already done a LOT of work in Photoshop to get the figure to this level of finished art, I decided that the quickest way to continue was to draw 'head' and 'arm' patches (see below) to fix up the artwork.
 


These were integrated with the original black and white line art and then coloured and added to the work-in-progress figure. This saved me having to go back to the drawing board and re-doing the figure from scratch, saving me a ton of time. This is where computers come in real handy.
Final art for Lady Tron character
I already had some environments in development for the world of Tron as I'd previously developed a TRON: Uprising Paige piece and was also working on some Batman / Catwoman / Tron amalgam pieces in tandem. There's also a reason why Lady Tron's right leg is cocked up, she's standing on a derezzed games program. This was sketched and inked, then coloured in Photoshop with the derezzed pixels being composited using Adobe Illustrator. Fun, fun, fun.

Derezzed Games Program - taken out by Lady Tron.
Background image sans characters
Final composite artwork. Lady Tron Disk Wars

Alternate version

...
Damian K. Sheiles