Faerie Travel Poster Process

Hello Friends!

An Embarrassment of Witches is now being serialized on my Patreon page! 

New pages are going up every Tuesday and Friday and access starts at the $3 level, with $5+ patrons getting easy-to-read monthly PDFs collecting all the finished pages and process art from the previous month, plus some extras.

Check out the first page with all the trimmings here!

While finished pages are reserved for my patrons, I thought it would be fun to share my process for this stand-alone piece, a promotional travel poster for the Land of Faerie that I created to put on Rory's bedroom wall in An Embarrassment of Witches.

I looked at a ton of travel posters for ideas, and then scoured the interwebs for some additional visual inspiration. If you're at all curious, I've collected all the images on this oh-so-convenient Pinterest board for you.

Here's the thumbnail I drew, somewhat larger then life-size:

Then I printed that up larger and pencilled over it, referencing the Pinterest page again for details.

And then inks, naturally.

An Embarrassment of Witches only has black, white, and a 30% grey tone but for the poster I wanted a little bit more to work with so I added a 60% grey, resulting in the finished image at top. That image will probably never appear in the book though, unless perhaps as supplementary material, because it's far too detailed to shrink down and put into a panel as a background element without appearing entirely out of place. Thus, I was forced to create a simplified image of the poster suitable for actual placement in the comic:

Mostly I just converted all the 60% greys to 30% greys and removed the lineart over the tones. It's still a little too detailed but... ah well.

And here it is, squeezed into the background of a couple panels:

On page 10:

On page 11:

In retrospect it does seem a bit silly to have spent two days on a background element that virtually no one will notice but I justify it to myself that:

a) Rory's interest in Faerie is important later on in the book.
b) The poster will show up a couple more times.
c) I can color the poster later and turn it into a print or something!?!?

...sigh.

Anyway, that's the process! Now I feel totally ridiculous but hopefully you, dear reader, feel better informed and not at all doubtful of my sanity.

Yrs in comics,
Sophie

PS: If you enjoyed this post, every page of An Embarrassment of Witches that goes up on my Patreon page also includes the script, thumbs, pencils and inks for that page. Check out the first page with all the trimmings here!