The Comic Book Collection by Kernie
I'm always busy!Bazzah wrote:QUOTE (Bazzah @ Jul 17 2020, 05:42 AM) Wow, you have been a busy boy!
Covers for the recent seasons of The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead have not been started yet, but they are close to being next on my to-do list. At this point, it's not likely you'll see them until late August or September at the earliest.kalell75 wrote:QUOTE (kalell75 @ Jul 17 2020, 07:22 AM) An amazing addition, really enjoyed this show and agree, who knows if there will be a second season. As for whats coming next, I'm hoping fear the walking dead season 5 or The Mandalorian maybe...just excited to see what is coming next week
I'm not sure why you would expect The Mandalorian to be included. My collection is for things that were originally based on comic books. Yes, there are many Star Wars comics out there, but everything Star Wars is based on the 1977 movie Star Wars. I've had this debate many, many, many times in this thread, so I'm not really keen on revisiting that discussion. Star Wars will never be included in this collection. Sorry.
Last edited by Kernie on Fri Jul 17, 2020 1:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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JollyRoger
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Loving this, Andrew!!
The Watchmen comics has always been a personal favorite of mine, and thus my interest in anything related to them is high.
Everything from the Snyder movie, even the recent TV series; the spin off comics...
Your work here really complements the original comics, and the movie version. Again nice custom TTs, attention to detail. Just wow.
Very excited to see what you have in store for us next!
The Watchmen comics has always been a personal favorite of mine, and thus my interest in anything related to them is high.
Everything from the Snyder movie, even the recent TV series; the spin off comics...
Your work here really complements the original comics, and the movie version. Again nice custom TTs, attention to detail. Just wow.
Very excited to see what you have in store for us next!
A designer knows he has achieved perfection - not when there's nothing left to add - but when there's nothing left to take away
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
SITE RULES
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
SITE RULES
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Bunny Dojo
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Seeing Watchmen receive the official Kernie endorsement has me sold, have to check it out! 
Any new addition in your collection is exciting, but posts where you have a set of matching series covers together particularly showcases the power of this lineup. Count me in as looking forward to the making-of -- your cape creation in the last one was especially interesting!
Any new addition in your collection is exciting, but posts where you have a set of matching series covers together particularly showcases the power of this lineup. Count me in as looking forward to the making-of -- your cape creation in the last one was especially interesting!
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Punisherchad
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Here's a behind-the-scenes for the 2009 Watchmen film. I'll make a separate post for the recent HBO series in a little while.
At first glance at my cover, it might be assumed that I just shifted a few characters around from this piece of poster art...
[attachment=43994:01_watch...original.jpg]
...and that assumption would be understandable. There's not too much in the way of "groundbreaking" arrangement in my keyart. But I wanted there to a bit more variety in the scale of some characters, pushing Rorschach to the obvious forefront and having others a bit further back in space. The retail art keeps them all relatively the same size, which is fine but I wanted a bit more "pop."
In order to get each character isolated so that I could shift them around, I needed to mask out each one of them and fill in the "blanks" where the figures overlapped. While it might be excessive, I prefer to have a "full" version of the character to work with, so that I have a lot of freedom to move them around wherever I want them, without worrying about parts of the original image that aren't there. Luckily, alternate versions of the same images popped up in other posters (see below) so I was able to fuse most of the missing pieces back in where they belong. In other areas in which I couldn't clone, a simple "fade to black" gradient seemed to do the trick.
[attachment=43996:01_watchmen_fixes.jpg]
For Dr. Manhattan, I merged one of the only promotional images I could find with the legs of a 3D model image from a Google Search. Since he's a CGI character, it's harder to find many publicity images of him because he doesn't actually "exist" to be photographed. I couldn't find any hands that would fit his pose, and knowing that they would likely be obscured anyway, I saved the time and skipped them. If I were to need them for some reason in the future, I could probably find stock images or even take photos of my own hands to use, but for this case, I didn't bother.
I also hate the obnoxious blue/teal/yellow filters that have been applied to the first image above, so I wanted to fix that and bring in some of the natural colors. That meant using the Camera Raw filter to try to reverse-engineer the filtering that had been done, and then going in and recoloring portions or the entirety of the characters to bring them back to their original hues.
For Nite Owl's cape, I used the trusty old Supergirl cape renders from Cinema4D that I created for the DC Crossover keyart. Those fabric simulations will be the gifts that keep on giving!
[attachment=43997:02_watch...acters01.png]
[attachment=43998:03_watch...acters02.png]
The rest fell together pretty easily... adding in the requisite sparks, debris, rain, water droplet splashes (thanks, ctaulbee!), and lighting effects to create the finished keyart you see below...
[attachment=43999:04_watchmen_keyart.jpg]
For the back cover, I created a new "smiley face" button in Cinema 4D using a pre-existing model from TurboSquid (no Watchmen-related squid pun intended). I wanted a certain amount of reflectiveness and gloss to the button, so I played around with the texture, material, and lighting to get it the way I wanted it.
[attachment=44000:05_watchmen_badge.jpg]
Then I added the face and blood drip (along with some additional re-coloring and lighting) in Photoshop.
[attachment=44001:05_watch...badge_02.png]
And because I felt that the bright, yellow button was just a bit too distracting to the overall cover, I placed it inside of a "Doomsday Clock" with a blue brick wall texture behind it. This helped to shrink the button and make it less of an immediate focal point. On its own, the yellow button was just too big and an eyesore.
[attachment=44002:05_watch...badge_03.png]
One of the unfortunate things about my new cover is that the pile of papers on the back cover aren't as obvious as I had hoped. I wanted them to be small, so they would look like a giant pile, but what's actually on those pages becomes too difficult to discern at such a small size.
On the Watchmen cover (and the motion comic and 2019 series), those papers are pages from Rorschach's Journal. I copied the text from Alan Moore's graphic novel and arranged them on a journal page, using the Dave Gibbons Journal font from ComiCraft. There are 15 different pages total, below is an example of four of them. I used the Trapcode Particular plug-in in Adobe After Effects to turn each page into a custom particle, then duplicate them, then pile them all up.
[attachment=44005:06_rorsc..._journal.png]
On the Tales of the Black Freighter cover, I switched things up and made the pages be excerpts from Under the Hood, the "book within a book" by Hollis Mason from the original Watchmen graphic novel. Since the faux Under the Hood documentary is also included on the Black Freighter disc, I felt this would provide it some level of representation. There are 14 different pages total but they are arranged using the same Trapcode Particular settings, so while the pile might look the same as the Watchmen cover, the individual sprites are actually different.
[attachment=44006:06_under_the_hood.png]
Overall, I'm quite pleased with the result and think it's definitely a much-needed improvement from my previous version! I hope you'll agree!
Old Cover:
[attachment=44003:dcfs_wat...bd_cover.jpg]
New Cover:
[attachment=44007:dcfs_wat...bd_cover.jpg]
Thanks for reading! I'll post some inside-looks at the HBO Watchmen cover in a few days!
At first glance at my cover, it might be assumed that I just shifted a few characters around from this piece of poster art...
[attachment=43994:01_watch...original.jpg]
...and that assumption would be understandable. There's not too much in the way of "groundbreaking" arrangement in my keyart. But I wanted there to a bit more variety in the scale of some characters, pushing Rorschach to the obvious forefront and having others a bit further back in space. The retail art keeps them all relatively the same size, which is fine but I wanted a bit more "pop."
In order to get each character isolated so that I could shift them around, I needed to mask out each one of them and fill in the "blanks" where the figures overlapped. While it might be excessive, I prefer to have a "full" version of the character to work with, so that I have a lot of freedom to move them around wherever I want them, without worrying about parts of the original image that aren't there. Luckily, alternate versions of the same images popped up in other posters (see below) so I was able to fuse most of the missing pieces back in where they belong. In other areas in which I couldn't clone, a simple "fade to black" gradient seemed to do the trick.
[attachment=43996:01_watchmen_fixes.jpg]
For Dr. Manhattan, I merged one of the only promotional images I could find with the legs of a 3D model image from a Google Search. Since he's a CGI character, it's harder to find many publicity images of him because he doesn't actually "exist" to be photographed. I couldn't find any hands that would fit his pose, and knowing that they would likely be obscured anyway, I saved the time and skipped them. If I were to need them for some reason in the future, I could probably find stock images or even take photos of my own hands to use, but for this case, I didn't bother.
I also hate the obnoxious blue/teal/yellow filters that have been applied to the first image above, so I wanted to fix that and bring in some of the natural colors. That meant using the Camera Raw filter to try to reverse-engineer the filtering that had been done, and then going in and recoloring portions or the entirety of the characters to bring them back to their original hues.
For Nite Owl's cape, I used the trusty old Supergirl cape renders from Cinema4D that I created for the DC Crossover keyart. Those fabric simulations will be the gifts that keep on giving!
[attachment=43997:02_watch...acters01.png]
[attachment=43998:03_watch...acters02.png]
The rest fell together pretty easily... adding in the requisite sparks, debris, rain, water droplet splashes (thanks, ctaulbee!), and lighting effects to create the finished keyart you see below...
[attachment=43999:04_watchmen_keyart.jpg]
For the back cover, I created a new "smiley face" button in Cinema 4D using a pre-existing model from TurboSquid (no Watchmen-related squid pun intended). I wanted a certain amount of reflectiveness and gloss to the button, so I played around with the texture, material, and lighting to get it the way I wanted it.
[attachment=44000:05_watchmen_badge.jpg]
Then I added the face and blood drip (along with some additional re-coloring and lighting) in Photoshop.
[attachment=44001:05_watch...badge_02.png]
And because I felt that the bright, yellow button was just a bit too distracting to the overall cover, I placed it inside of a "Doomsday Clock" with a blue brick wall texture behind it. This helped to shrink the button and make it less of an immediate focal point. On its own, the yellow button was just too big and an eyesore.
[attachment=44002:05_watch...badge_03.png]
One of the unfortunate things about my new cover is that the pile of papers on the back cover aren't as obvious as I had hoped. I wanted them to be small, so they would look like a giant pile, but what's actually on those pages becomes too difficult to discern at such a small size.
On the Watchmen cover (and the motion comic and 2019 series), those papers are pages from Rorschach's Journal. I copied the text from Alan Moore's graphic novel and arranged them on a journal page, using the Dave Gibbons Journal font from ComiCraft. There are 15 different pages total, below is an example of four of them. I used the Trapcode Particular plug-in in Adobe After Effects to turn each page into a custom particle, then duplicate them, then pile them all up.
[attachment=44005:06_rorsc..._journal.png]
On the Tales of the Black Freighter cover, I switched things up and made the pages be excerpts from Under the Hood, the "book within a book" by Hollis Mason from the original Watchmen graphic novel. Since the faux Under the Hood documentary is also included on the Black Freighter disc, I felt this would provide it some level of representation. There are 14 different pages total but they are arranged using the same Trapcode Particular settings, so while the pile might look the same as the Watchmen cover, the individual sprites are actually different.
[attachment=44006:06_under_the_hood.png]
Overall, I'm quite pleased with the result and think it's definitely a much-needed improvement from my previous version! I hope you'll agree!
Old Cover:
[attachment=44003:dcfs_wat...bd_cover.jpg]
New Cover:
[attachment=44007:dcfs_wat...bd_cover.jpg]
Thanks for reading! I'll post some inside-looks at the HBO Watchmen cover in a few days!
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Last edited by Kernie on Sun Jul 19, 2020 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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