Death Jr. Vol. 2 Compilation Cover - Part 2

It has been an absolutely INSANE 2 and a half weeks! Work has been killing me, and I have had absolutely no life (not a big change but still, I'm dead tired!)! It's been eat, work and sleep. I'm cranking in some serious double digit hours-a-day for the past two and a half weeks. We have a killer deadline coming up and I'm not sure how much more my body can take, but hopefully it will all slow down a little bit by the 5th. And then my work hours will go from seriously-mega-insane to just plain stoopid-insane. I just have to hold out!

Okay, no more work talk! I will enjoy as much of my Sunday as I can! Don't think I have the strength to gab and ramble as much as I usually do on my blog, but that just means more pictures and less talk!

After the roughs, comes the obligatory run to kinko's to blow up my image onto two 11 x 17 proportions and then I use that a template for my bluelined pencils:
I used to lightbox my layouts alot after the kinko's stage, but I really like working directly over my tighter layouts, so the non-photo blue method is my preference. There's something that's mentally freeing for me when I work like this. Here are the pencils:
After this I make another Kinko's run and get my blacks to tighten up. Then I scan the photocopy in and spot my blacks ala Photoshop's lasso tool.
After this I went onto the coloring stage using Photoshop. I usually color very simply, but even though the application is very fast with ol' bucket Phil, I end up tweaking a lot of values and messing around with stuff towards the end.
I really wanted for a very eye-grabbing color, hence the crazy pink. I felt it was a color I don't really see much on the stands and I wanted this book to pop. And actually it cause a little bit of a controversy at work because people weren't to receptive of it. And honestly I didn't know how people would react to it. But the one thing I did know was that if there was one thing I wanted to stay it was this pink, consarnit!

I got in touch with Image comic for the size they needed the piece to be and I have to say I've grown up with comic books all my life but I never realize what an odd size it's in! I had to re-adjust the cover's dimensions a bit to fit tradepaperback size and cropping, but in all it was for the best.

Also I've never done print work before so I was EXTRA paranoid about converting the colors from RGB to CMYK. Some colors I used just didn't translate very well (like the pink!). Certain things had to change when I converted it over like DJ's head and the zombies' eyes.

GAH! What is that funky monstrosity above! Why, it's my DJ Paperback final CMYK colors! Wow, it looks even MORE horrible on blogger! Anyway, the actual file looks good in Photoshop but it looks horrible on normal computer browsers!

So I sent this off to Image to have printed and forgot about it when work started to get on a roll again. Oop, I said no more work talk! Anyway let's avert our eyes from that and onto the final printed cover.
I was so excited when I first saw this on the comic book racks! My first comic book cover! Printed and on the shelves! The colors came out nice, the cover stock was a nice matte finish, it all came together well! I am definitely eternally thankful to my bosses at work and of course to God that I got this chance to realize a lifelong dream! A comic book cover by me! I need to get better dreams! Haha!

Looks like I managed to ramble on anyways, even though I promised to shut my trap! I'm hoping to start up coloring on my own comic book one of these days and I'll try to post up progress on those as I go along! Until next post! Good night and God Bless!