We're so excited for our Free Comic Book Day 2012 comics that we just can't help but talk about them early. Adam Rex is the cover artist on the FCBD 2012 The Guild comic and he took a little time to share his fun process for getting reference materials for the cover. We hope you're as excited as we are for this Free comic.
I couldn’t turn down this job. My wife and I are fans of Felicia Day, so even though I’m overbooked—I’m supposed to be writing a novel at the moment—it was worth losing a few nights and weekends.
Here’s the sketch I submitted to Scott Allie, with the caveat that I was going to spend some more time firming up the likenesses. I approached this cover not as if the Guild’s in-game characters were at the beach, but rather as if the real-life characters were LARPing there or whatever. Felicia’s story pitch gave me some direction regarding what sort of beach activities each Guildie may be partaking in.
The sketch was approved basically without comment, so I started gathering reference. I searched for images of the cast and grabbed somewhere between two and six images of each actor. Old vacation photos of Kauai served as inspiration for the backdrop.
None of my actor photos were appropriately posed or lit, of course, so my very patient wife, Marie, and I sat for a battery of photos in our backyard. I was looking forward to painting the way warm light bounced off the sand and onto the undersides of everything, and the cool decking around my pool turned out to be an adequate stand-in. This picture of Marie is a composite of three different photographs—it was a complicated pose and hard to get everything just right in one shot.
Special appearance by my cat:
This was about as good as I could do, costume-wise, though I did shoot Marie in a white t-shirt just for color. We posed for each of the other characters as well. I make a distressingly good stand-in for Vork.
All this helped me refine the original sketch. This version was likewise approved, though Felicia quite rightly thought Zaboo looked a little like Kevin Pollak here.
The final was painted in Photoshop CS3 with a Wacom Intuos. I would have liked to have the time to oil paint this one, but I have to say I was thankful for the Undo button.
Adam Rex