Stages Of A Drawing

Page 0101 of Constantinople is a full-page 'splash panel' of a cityscape which is basically the first page of the story. I took photos to show how this thing was put together.

First of all, the pencil stage:

The image was drawn in curvilinear perspective. This basically involved drawing a circle inside a square, marking off equal measurements along the square and then using a compass to draw arcs from the top and bottom outwards, and diagonal axes through the centre point. The buildings were then pencilled in along these lines.

Why bother? Well, I wanted the opening visual to be unusual. You can't see it too well but that's me (the 'pencil' character) falling in from the top. I've used some pretty cheap yellow transparent paper, which isn't recommended, but it's all going to be scanned anyway.

Moving on to the ink stage:

Now it's all inked in with fineliners, except for the lettering on the signs and buildings. As you can see, it gives a spherical effect that isn't used much in comics (because it takes so long). The whole scene is cropped in by the circular border so you can't see the ground, which made things a bit easier.

Here's how the final image looks:

Not too bad – minimal shades of grey and hardly any shading, which would make it look more like a ball. Text added in and a black background, and there you have it. One page down, only a zillion more to go.