In page 11, the story jumps forward a couple of years, though that’s not specifically important.
The next few pages are going to give insight into Robert’s daily life as a house slave to the McKee family, starting with his early rising with the other house slaves.
This page was entirely compiled in Clip Studio Paint, though as mentioned before, the first panel is a reworking of an earlier one created in Photoshop.
I’m still loving Clip Studio as it is just so much more geared up for creating this sort of project than Photoshop is, and it is much more tablet-friendly too. This page is possibly the first where I felt I had a solid workflow down, knew exactly what I wanted to do and the easiest way to achieve it, and in which order.
I’ve been pushing myself to use areas of completely blacked out shading more and trying to develop my hatching and crosshatching more to strengthen my inks so hopefully, you think they both work here.
I was a bit unsure of the best way to create a nighttime candle-lit look with the colours. Colours and colour-theory are things I still have much to learn about. At one point, I started out colouring Robert’s skin purple (see the first page – I think it works) but wasn’t sure about it here and if I could keep the other colours consistent, so decided to colour it as I normally would and adjust them later.
I flatted the whole page using the colours for the people and the room that I had used before, then desaturated them, darkened them, and shifted them towards blue with an adjustment layer overlay (imagine a sheet of acetate laid over the original colours with the colour corrections printed on it) as I had for the first panel. Then I erased bits of the adjustment layer to let the true colours come through where I thought light might be hitting them quite directly. Over that, I placed an overlay layer with an orange tinge to give everything a candlelit sort of look, and then I drew candlelight highlights on parts of the image.
Other than that, page 11 was a fairly straight forward page to draw.
I have a timelapse video of this page being made from partway through the inking stage and I’ll get that up over the next few days.
For my “Progressive Hero” tier patrons and above, the high-resolution version of the comic so far, including this page is here.
The next page is already available to all my Patrons at www.unsungsuperheroes.com/patreon.
Thanks!
Unsung Superheroes is an ongoing project, creating graphic novels based on the stories of real-life historical figures whose stories may not be as well-known as they could be.
New pages are added to the current story on the Homepage.
If you would like to help support this project financially, please consider signing up to my Patreon. For less than the price of a cup of coffee per new page created, you can become a Patron of the Arts and help keep this project going. There’s no minimum sign-up period. You can stop at any time.
Also available is the opportunity for you to appear as a character in the novel.
I’m donating 10% of all pledges to Anti-Slavery International to help them in their efforts to stop modern-day slavery and human trafficking.
Or if recurring payments aren’t for you, you can “Buy Me A Coffee” and make a one-time donation of as little as £1 without having to create an account. Again, 10% of your donation will go to Anti-Slavery International.