In-Depth: Bad Reception
I have an idea. Let me show you guys how I made a Terence N. Tijuana comic.
Today, we’ll look at Bad Reception, which I posted on The 4th Of July, 2008. A significant date for a certain population, I realise.
The panel I’m interested in is the sixth, which features our main character gazing in surprise at something in the sky as he stands at the top of a skyscraper. The challenge here was drawing a human figure from a top-down angle, with foreshortening. I Googled around and managed to pull this off somehow, so, yay…
1: The sketch, done in Flash.
2: Flatting, which is the initial few layers containing the foundation colours.
3: Shading. There are many ways I use to shade, and in this piece, I used the ol’ slap-on-a-darker-colour-and-summon-gaussian-blur.
4: Highlights, using the same technique as #3, but with lighter colours.
The next challenge was rendering a believable surface to represent the concrete roof of the building. This was incredibly difficult to do realistically, and I experimented a lot before producing results I was satisfied with.
5: Laying down the basis for the concrete surface.
6: Adding a bit of texture with Photoshop’s Cloud filter, and inserting a shadow for the character (see #3).
7: Adding more textures to simulate a ‘concrete-y’ look. I used the selection tool to outline certain areas, filled these areas with dark colours, and ran them through a motion filter in Photoshop.
8: Repeat with whites and yellows instead of dark colours. I also added some Noise to the lighter areas.
Voila! Throw in a few more shadows to indicate the presence of objects in the sky above our charater, and we’re done! A grand total of 68 Photoshop layers!
