illustration friday - PUPPET

Illustration Friday - TROUBLE

illustration friday - octopuss

paper or digital

Upper image is paper inking and photoshop coloring, second image is the same paper inking and watercolors coloring - only the text is a digital edit -
I guess those almost 8 years of experiment lead to a conclusion: My best weapon is a traditional paper inking and a digital coloring and post production effects.

Illustration Friday - Wish

I wish I could sleep.

illustration friday : Metamorphosis

Illo Friday - Journey

I was just getting beer buzzed while listening to this song when today's topic dropped down, it seemed appropriate enough. I am sure now, I'm more a ball pen type of guy than a wacom kind of geek. The wacom's just good enough for some make up around the bones.

Lindy Hop girl

Here's a Lindy Hop influenced DJ girls made for the enthusiastic tailgatecafe 
pencil on paper, strokes in Manga Studio and Illustrator and Photoshop coloring.
Other than that, I am forcing myself to a couple of weeks of summer inactivity in the hope that the desire will come back into a different form and that I lose some of my graphic habits.

More Manga Studio experiment

While working on our next comic book depicting the Ford-Ferrari war at Le Mans, I had the opportunity to work further with the very talented Tanja Cinna on the under mentionned series of schoolbook illustrations aimed at Belgian teenagers. This is so much NOT what I am used to do, it turned out to be a breeze of fresh digital air in what otherwise starts to look like a regular job.
I did all the inking in Manga Studio with a twitch of adobe illustrator, and Tanja lit the scenes in fire with her colors.

IllustrationFriday - Survival

For some mysterious reason, I recieved the topic again, so here's something about survival. Me surviving without paper that is. Inking in Manga Studio and coloring in Photoshop.

Still torturing myself with the Wacom, I also made this april fool cover in digital

still struggling with the Wacom as a pro.

 Here's another insomnia exercise with Wacom intuos, Manga Studio inking and photoshop textures coloring.

I recently did a test for a publishing company that needed hundreds of sketches for a language teaching book.

 It needed to go fast so I first experimented with pen and paper,

(colors by the very talented Tanja Cinna)

then decided to switch to manga studio to obtain a slicker stroke and work the characters in digital only.

I've been bitten in the backside now since I passed the test, not for the hundreds of small character drawings, but for potentially dozens of elaborate perspective views and characters; I might be playing out of my league as far as digital drawing skills are involved.

But it is a refreshing exercise to pass time before I jump on another automotive comic book about the 24h of Le Mans. See you this summer on a race track somewhere.

another random exercice

I wonder why this wacom exercise is so conveniently shaped as a facebook header.

I've been trying to mix pen inking with watercolours grey shading AND digital colours effect, I reckon the final product isn't all bad. I hope I can "exploit" this soon in a new comic book.

This is so much NOT my usual universe, it proved a painful yet interesting exercise.


On the work front, our latest book "Alpine" seemed to have gain a lot of attention and against all odds could be our biggest success based on the first 3 weeks only ! We're going into reprint already ! I still try to understand when and how things went from no luck no respect no issue I'm gonna die a delivery boy to considerable commercial success with a book that at first I did'nt really want to work on.  Maybe I'm just not so good at picking jobs.



It would be nice if the money could start to be decent now tho.

our next book will be out in about a month (yes, it has been a long and busy 10 month) and it will probably sell on its title alone, and a 20th death anniversary, and it was written by a personal friend of the main character and french specialist of the matter. It will probably be available soon in dutch and italian, maybe my french publisher will find a way to close a deal on another english version and finally get us all invited to goodwood. That would be swell. 

In the mean time, I use the few days of freedom between projects to try to remember who I used to be as an author and launch new and more intimate projects where doing things in a traditional way of showing off technical know how in a shiny and pompous way is less important than a kind of immediate sensation. Who knows.

No one.

And by the way, 2014 is NOT a leap year.

trimestrial update

Here's a little candy I did as a recreational wacom exercise waiting for the soup to heat in the microwave.

This winter will be spent in my workshop. I have a new book coming out tomorrow January 29th, and another scheduled for early may, shrinking a reasonable 5 or 6 month of work into only 3, as a book in libraries in may has to be delivered on march 1rst. Good thing 2014 is a leap year. :)

This month's book is a demand from our publisher and tells the story of french car make Alpine-Renault. Unlike our series Chapman, I doubt that it will ever be translated into any other language than french and flemish due to its limited interest outside the french market.

Spring and summer should be spent riding the Triumph around europe to present and sign the books in comic conventions and classic race meetings  At least that's the plan. Signings and presentations dates can be found on my regular website, starting next week February 7 in Paris.