Cat Cult Concept Art (Documenting a Process)

I love the documenting of an art project of any kind.  To see how someone or a collective take an artistic project from concept to completion, the mind's eye to paper, I think this is great, and I try to do that here when I can.  With that in mind, let me make a shoutout to Daredevil Chicken.

What is Daredevil Chicken?  Well, Scott Nelson and Jannie Ho write,

Daredevil Chicken is a project started by Scott Nelson and Jannie Ho. What happens when two artists with two different styles collaborate and work on a 32-page picture book about a daredevil chicken? Follow along and see what happens!

Sounds pretty awesome to me.  This is also proves that not everything on Twitter is complete crap, because I found Daredevil Chicken through Twitter @JannieHo.  Good luck, folks!  I plan to check back often to see the progress.

As for me, I have begun a collaboration with another artist on a project entitled Cat Cult.  Another reason why I mention Daredevil Chicken is that Scott and Jannie are trying to combine/collaborate with two different art styles, and the same goes here.  Although the art below is all mine, we are trying to divvy up / co-work in panels and pages together with two fairly different art styles.  If I went into details as to the concept and the meaning behind this project, it might just blow your mind, so let's skip that.  Just know that I sharpened up my true blue non-reproducing colored pencil and some H's and HB's, fired up the Epson, and started sketching.  I have mentioned this before, but non-reproducing blue is great, because you can write notes and do lots of revisions to a piece of art without having to worry about it showing up in the scan or a copy.  Let me set the scene: two characters go to a motel for an investigation of sorts, but the motel they go has some surprises in store for them.  All is not what it seems. Here is the first draft layout.  Again, this is concept art, it's just ideas.  Actually, my collaborator has not approved this in any way, and it is possible that not a single panel of the work will look anything like this.

The blue lines are blue colored pencil, obviously.  The darker lines are H or HB pencil.  I find that blue pencil does not really ever fully erase, even with a good eraser, so what I tend to do is make adjustments to the blue lines with a regular pencil, then I can easily erase the regular pencil and re-work it, keeping the remnants of the blue lines and I can see how it started and then progressed.


As you can see, I want to use perspective on the final panel, but I still need to decide exactly how that will look and where the vanishing point will be.  You can see that the pointed arch (Gothic style) doors on either side are uneven and the arches that disappear being the desk (at the center) are not worked out yet.  It could be a job for heavy use of shadow to make it more mysterious, but also to blur out some potentially complicated architectural drawing  I went back and forth about doing the columns and arches.  They would make for a dramatic scene, lots of opportunity for details being worked in amongst the architectural design.  It will, however, take more planning and sketching and will be fairly painstaking in terms of final layout sketches and inking. I am going to post this now, but I will be trying to re-work this page and post a second version tonight.