Thursday, April 14, 2011

Candy Coral & Grandma's Cookies



SpongeBob Comics #2 has landed in a comics shop near you! The cover art is reason enough to pick up the second issue—with this killer Rat Fink inspired illustration by Brian Smith, colored by Mark Martin.

By the almighty powers of Neptune, I somehow have 2 comics in this issue. One made the back cover, and the other is a 2-pager.




Below is the sketch I drew to pitch "Grandma's Cookies".



From there, I did a more refined drawing in Flash. I thought it would be easier because I could move things around—really work it out digitally without having to do a ton of erasing or redraw.



This comic kicked my butt. It was a tough exercise in creating flow (literally, a path) through an illustration.

Once I figured out the drawing (I would consider this the pencils stage), I then inked over it in Flash for a tighter finish.





Finally, color.




"Candy Coral" started out as a one-pager.



But my fearless editor, Chris Duffy, wanted me to expand it to 2 pages so we could open up the tongue section. A great call, on his part.

I made a bunch of drawings for the 4-panel montage where SpongeBob and Patrick get all twisted and tied up. These are a few that we dropped, or further refined.



I particularly like the one where they are tripping on their own tongues (above), but I'm glad we replaced it with the super-stretched tongue knot. I try to keep it loose even when I'm sketching in Flash. This is what I like to call "scrawl"—where I draw fast and quick to pack as much energy as possible. The challenge is to retain that life in the final inks.



I had fun drawing all the various poses and expressions for the comic, but this is probably my favorite.



Here are the final colors. United Plankton Pictures adds all the dialogue, lettering, and sound effects with Comicraft fonts.





I finished reading the full issue last night. There are a lot of fun comics in this one, by artists & writers including James Kochalka, Andy Rementer, R. Sikoryak, Derek Drymon, Gregg Schigiel, Jacob Chabot, Robert Leighton, Molly Dolben, Scott Roberts, and Rick Neilsen. Well worth $2.99 and supporting your local comics shop.

If you're lucky, you still may be able to find copies of issue #1 (also amazing), which included my GlowSponge comic.

Thanks for reading!

10 comments:

Vincent Waller said...

Great drawings! love it.

Raiben said...

it´s amazing Bob... i have a question, when you finished the picture in flash how translate the .swf at .jpg format? I "export" the picture at jpg but the quality is wrong... you undestand? thanks master!! ;)

Bob Flynn said...

Thanks, Vincent!
Raiben: The best way to get images out of Flash is the PNG format. No compression, and it includes an alpha channel (for transparency). There is a pixel size limit, though. Somewhere around 4000 pixels. So, any bigger, and I export as vector (EPS). Hope that helps.

Raiben said...

ok, ok...i will try this, thanks for your tutorials on your blog, it help me very much.

Noam Sussman said...

great work! its nice to see the process :)

Raiben said...

Bob, you inked the picture in black, but then the picture finished have much color lines, how made this?
Sorry if i´m tiring

Bob Flynn said...

Really good question. I inked it all in black, and then I imported the linework into Photoshop (a PNG with a transparent background). I then colored the line in photoshop (by locking the transparency), and colored underneath it for everything else.

I should've mentioned the Photoshop step.

That said, I could've colored the whole thing in Flash if I wanted to. You can use "Painted selected" in Flash with the brush to achieve different line colors, after inking in black. And then color underneath in Flash as well.

Raiben said...

Perfect, thanks bob, you´re really very nice, and patience too ;)

i take notes, it´s very interesting.

blog said...

Yeah, like sussman said, this is great and its cool to see the process.

OLLA BOKU said...

OMG i love your style much:DD
fantastic~~~