This is a story about a wanderer in an unnamed European city in the 19th century, who falls into a horrible trap set a long, long time ago. These are the first five pages.
Story, dialogue and art by myself; the visual style is meant to recall the grainy texture and contrast of early photography. It's achieved by layering in Photoshop scanned textures, more on the process below.
The process starts with a 9" by 12" pencil drawing, refined a great deal then inked with a Pigma Micron 01 pen.
That's scanned and cleaned further in Photoshop. At this stage I might also adjust sizes (for example the character in the middle has been reduced in size and moved back).
The cleaned lines are moved to a top layer set on Multiply, and I add the black & white values on separate layers under that top layer. As I knew I would be adding textures on top, I was OK at this stage with a very smooth un-textured look, otherwise I would have used textured PS brushes.
I then add the textures on top, in several layers. The textures are scanned from old yellowed books, including torn corners (on the bottom). It's a little frustrating at this stage to see all the architectural details, especially at the top, disappear into the shadows, but the point of the first page is to establish the mysterious nighttime mood, so it's necessary.
Finally I add gutters, frames around the panels, and text. The font used is one I made from my scanned hand-writing.
