I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to handle the cloaked ship look until I got to the coloring stage. In Volume 1, Hamron’s ship has a grid pattern over it when it engages and disengages the cloak, but that was more work than I cared to do this time around.
In these situations, I put the ship on its own separate layer in Photoshop and let the colorist know to keep any work on the ship separate from the rest of the page. That way, any effect can be as easy as changing the opacity of the ship with a layer mask.
Wes did his own take on the cloak effect in the original coloring. But I always do a light pass on every page to fine tune some things and make sure all the pages look consistent. In this case, I played with the effect a bit more to find something that looked transparent while still allowing the reader to see the ship. I especially like how it turned out in the last panel.
Nice job on how the cloaking was visualized.
I especially like the transition panel.
Of course if an animated series comes about we should consider bringing the grid back. 😉
Story wise: I get the feeling they’re not out of the danger zone yet?
I do like the grid look, so maybe I’ll bring that back at some point. Definitely for the animated series. 🙂
This is one of the benefits of layers. I tend to put each character in their own folder so I can manipulate the whole folder, inks and colors, easier. It’s good when for example I get the size wrong and have to correct without altering the other characters. It takes longer but it’s worth it to me in the end. Plus I can do effects like this.
Yes! I still work traditionally on board, penciling and inking, but sometimes it would be great to have everything digital so I can move things around easier. I am about to start playing more with digital drawing in Clip Studio, so we’ll see how that goes! I’m generally a very slow adopter of new technology and processes. But I think at the very least, concepting digitally would be a vast improvement as far as revisions and iterations go. I’d probably still like to draw full pages on board though. But we’ll see!
A cloaked ship hidden somewhere in a large volume? Looks like the perfect opportunity to do an operational test of that fancy laser net weapon, see if it can fish the spies out!
Fish? Them get blasted! THOOM! 😉
last panel cloak does rock!!!