Skullkickers World Map

[Schley]

Here's a poster map of the world of "Skullkickers" I recently completed in collaboration with author Jim Zubkavich. It illustrate his darkly humorous fantasy series Skullkickers, published by Image Comics.

I'm really enjoying forced perspective and isometric mapping styles recently. I'm also enjoying a move towards a more classic illustration style while giving my inks and color washes a little more freedom and spontaneity.

As for process, my inks and colors are technically fairly simple. For the line work, in Photoshop I just set my pressure to control minimum diameter and turn on dual brush to get a nice sharp tip. Beyond a few other setting tweaks, it's all in the wrist. For my color layers, I like to start with a loose and broad application of my principal colors just to fill and tint the background parchment. If you set the property of a layer of loosely painted base colors to multiply and then paint with similar colors to a normal layer on top, it can give a nice naturalistic bleed transition. Beyond that, I just try to mix up my brush tips and keep the painting energetic, refining the details towards the end. I also tend to frequently switch my brush and layer settings from normal to hard light or multiply depending on whether I'm shading or highlighting an area.

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