A quick preview of a watermelon world…
“The sky is red. Stars hang by a thread. The ground is green. The landscape is made of watermelon. Who made this place?”
I have to thank the kind stranger, from a certain networking event, that told me about watercolor brushes in Photoshop. I was able to buy them last weekend and in doing so, I saved a whole bunch of time. Photoshop, the all mighty tool of image manipulation (and much more) has all sorts of complexities, and one of them is the capacity to customize your own brushes. I spent a few hours trying to make my own brushes, but as the stranger said that I should not waste time doing that since you can buy sets of brushes… It is working, much better than I expected too!
However, like everything else, I must spend countless hours mastering these new brushes. I’m all too glad to do so… Page 3 is complete and I will move on to Page 4.
With a little bit of luck I should be able to get to page 6 this weekend…
Dereck C.
I am almost done with page 3 of the comic book (out of 20) once I am done with all 20 I will figure out a way to post it online. My initial idea is to post all pages and set it up so that when I scroll down you see the art without the speech bubbles, but as you scroll more the speech bubbles appear in the right order. Not sure if this is going to work because I know very little about websites and such. We’ll see what happens then. For now I am going to post the different styles and changes that this first volume as gone through. In all honesty, this story called “Watermelon Days” is a way for me to get better at using the stylus and I am keeping myself motivation by posting it here. I want to have this process somewhere that I can have easy access to no matter where I go. I’ve invested a lot of hours refining, getting better, but the reason why I am doing so is because I want to improve even more. I have a loooooooong way to go, and it might take years before I can consider this artwork okay. Anyway, without further ado, here’s the original inking on page one, with a few variations that took me forever to try out:
Well, here we have a couple of weekends of work, the one without the heavy outlines is me trying to trace everything in Illustrator, the heavy outlines with color is letting Illustrator trace my inked drawings. I was not happy with either one. The one that I traced took forever to create and it doesn’t reflect the style that I desired to portray to tell my story… Then, in a revelation I had in my dreams I realized that I wanted this style to be in watercolor. Something I had never done before, however, after watching a few tutorials online to use Photoshop to create a watercolor look, I spent another weekend doing this:
At this moment I realized that I was being too tough on myself, and I was expecting too much for the first time of trying to recreate watercolors with Photoshop to look legit. I started to like this direction, so I continued all day, I figured, that if I keep working on it I will get quicker, and well, we will see if that’s the case.
I should say that when I first started to draw, I would draw everything with stick figures and I didn’t have any sort of innate ability to draw, it was because I dedicated myself to the point of obsession that I learned how to draw. Everything is possible with hard work and dedication. At any rate, I’ll continue to work on this thing, along with this blog. I supposed I will end this blog once I publish this comic book online.
Dereck C
A familiarly different story
This is the beginning, well, not officially. I started to draw a random comic book on 2009 because of some watermelon party that I threw around that time. The party was the inspiration for this comic book, but what happened during the party doesn’t really have anything to do with the plot of the story that I am about to tell.
Yep, that’s me wearing a carved half of a watermelon. In this random fashion, I came up with a story that’s about knowing that there is more to you than what others can see. While this is the main theme of the story you will find more…
Here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come:
This is Max, which is short for “Maximum Strength” you can draw your own conclusions as to why he’s decided to call himself like that… But he is, somewhat, the main character in our story.
Soon, I will release the first chapter of this adventure, it has taken a lot of work to finalize the style, environments, characters, story, themes and finally… I got enough courage to put this thing out there. It’s been four years since I started this story. I have been adding things here and there, editing it so it makes sense, and if at least one person finds this thing interesting, I will be happy, however if no one does I’ll still develop this story until its very end.
Welp, that’s all I’ve got as far as introducing this story. I will continue to post things here. Maybe this will become a good place to share some laughs with friends in the future as I tell them how I started publicly share this little story, a story I like to call: “Watermelon Days”
Dereck C
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