editorial
Light
10-16-2019
Hi everyone! Just a few quick words about the way I usually work. I start with a few tryouts in pencil, all on the same sheet of paper (lots of erasing), adapting and changing things until I'm satisfied, and then I work the whole thing out into a fullfledged pencil drawing. After that, I trace the page with a couple of micron pens (usually 0.5, 0.3 and 0.1), and if that's completed I scan them in and continue to render them in Photoshop. That's about the long and the short of it.
Now, I'm totally confident in this routine. I have been working like this for decades and it almost goes wrong. Long ago, when I was working with an actual airbrush, things might go horribly wrong from time to time. A sudden blast from the brush could ruin an entire page, painstakingly built up before. Or a whole pile of pages could be made useless by a glass of wine falling over.
So I'm very satisfied with this way of working. It has however one big disadvantage. This has plagued me even from before the time I started wielding the airbrush, and I was working everything out in pen and ink. The problem is: with the tracing process, my pencil drawing disappears forever. Of course, I do scan it in beforehand, and that's why we have the Sketchpage on the site, but still, the physical page is no more, and that has always bothered me. You see: the penciled page is the one with the most direct energy in it, with the most artistic input, you might say. And sometimes, people may actually prefer the pencils over the finished piece.
Follow up career move
09-26-2019
Welcome back! In New, there is a piece that is technically speaking a combination page, but as 95% of it is new, we decided to publish it there. (See if you can find that other 5%) There are also some real combi's in that section. Also updates in the Sketchpage and the Gif's. And there is a new short story under New, wherein we revisit Mrs. Davis and Gerald, from the 'Late career move' book. Check out how that relationship has progressed (and there's more to come).
Until next time,
CBAP
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Inking
09-04-2019
Hi there, welcome back! This time there is a new drawing under New in which I have tried to do something that I seldom do. You see, a lot of my favorite artist like Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri, have their pencils polished up and refined by inkers before they go to the colorist. Nowadays, inking has become a profession on its own (decades ago it was more usual for artists to ink their own work), and so, Jim Lee, for instance, has formed a team with the brilliant inker Scott Williams for many many years.
Early triggers
08-23-2019
Hi there everyone! I think I must have been something like twelve years old, maybe thirteen when I was reading these very old Flash Gordon albums. They were from the 1930s, beautifully drawn by Alex Raymond, in a kind of cinematic style. At my age at that time, the main attraction of the books was, of course, the abundance of scantily clad beautiful women. But it was also the time in which my BDSM feelings started to develop more and more.
Though I had had those frankly for as long as I can remember, they started to become more manifest, more focused, even though I still didn't have clue that other people had the same feelings, that there was a name for it etc. I just experienced a special tingling as I came across the image of Dale, stripped and tied to a wall.