CGAN Feb 2016 - Life on Mars - WIPs

micro: That glow is really mysterious and intriguing. It just looks ... "alien" in a way that's difficult to explain. I like!

Finally started a bit of "proper" painting after too many days of drawing boxes and rearranging them. :yawn:
So here's my current top row of panels...



...I'm quite happy with the planet's texture and craters. I still need to soften that horizon and add a bit more glow. I'll also add some more brighter stars when I start combining all the panels and adding the darker borders to separate the artwork from the gutters. I'm keeping some of the panels as separate files during the painting to give me a bit of leeway with the layout at the end.
Next I'll work on panel 4 which is gonna be the full width one which introduces the character and the desert.

Atto: I like the stairway idea. It reminds me of the MC Escher bit in the film Labyrinth, which would also link to the David Bowie connection.

Thanks for that Val, it has taken me in a new direction. I've always loved the series of paintings that Giger produced called 'Shafts'. His early sketches and lithographs featured some very vertigo inducing images of narrow dark stairways descending through vertical shafts. So I've extended the canvas vertically to give me room to depict the path into the solid bedrock of Mars where my alien civilisation once dwelt.
Perspective is still a little off in places and if I had the patience to do it all again I would drop in a stronger vertical perspective too but I'm lazy.

Looking good so far, Atto.

I had a go at panel four today. I'm going for a Lawrence Of Arabia type of image introducing the "hero" facing the dust-storms at the start of his journey. I want this one to extend right to the edges of the page and a bit "behind" the panels above and below.



I also had a bit of a test combining it into the layout with the previous pic and I think I'll need a bit of colour correcting to boost the reds.

Val, that scene in Laurence of Arabia is one of my favourite in cinematic history (along with that cut at the start of 2001) and youve captured some of that essence here really well. I love the break between the dust clouds that leads our eye into the desert along your 'hero's' path.

I've started detailing up on mine. The blue arches along the bottom are going to be lit with some kind of eerie light emanating from some weird alien artefact. The fore ground cliff face needs a lot more work, I'm wondering if there's too much of the orange and white highlights on it, whether it will compete too much with the areas I want the eye to be drawn but I think I'll have to see when I get closer to finishing it if it throws off the balance.

I have been out of the drawing for fun game awhile ! I think it is time to get back in it great topic

Phoenixdee: Everyone's welcome!

Atto: If you think the forms are competing with each other you could try emphasizing some them by increasing the saturation of the light areas to push them out of the shaded areas.
I think it looks OK as it is so just keep on detailing.
Those blue arches are intriguing!

Welcome Phoenixdee! The more the merrier!

Thanks Val, I've pushed it a little more and at least those rocks now look a little more like...errr...rocks now.

Done a bit more work on the bottom layer of panels. I thought these would require more work than the middle set so it seemed like a good idea to do them out of order.
All of the hands need much more work (especially that bottom left one)
They're still all separate files so the layout can still change (but only a bit!) and I should now start thinking about size and position of the captions and text.

Thats coming together very nicely Val. The central positioning of the scanner reads much better now and the overlapping boxes and lack of frame to the last panel breaks up the formality of the page. I do wonder if you should make more of the background of the last image, extending it to cover more of the white space between the frames. Lovely texture to the skin round that eye too.

Hi all!
Hey Valence, all well I hope, sorry I didn't finish that last image, the dragon slayer but I will.

Hey Cherry! you asked me about that german word, i'm from 'belgien', I know one or two (or more) german words, my girlfriend follows 'Sturm und Liebe" on belgium television. I wanted to learn german, but never got to it. I'm a big fan of german design (karl lagerfeld, the early Hugo Boss, ...) and music (James Last, electro, classical music, Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, Johann Sebastian Bach, Brahms , my favorite movie composer is Hans Zimmer, hi's german, one of my favorite painters is Caspar David Friedrich, one of my favorite political figures is Otto von Bismarck, ... so don't be surprised because I know a german word

Life on Mars" sounded like a cool challenge, and I felt like painting al large beast, how it got there I don't know yet.