Another promo piece for The Bill Collectors, a comic I’m working on in 3D.

This one was started of course in DazStudio 3, where all the characters were posed and rendered separately. After rendering I brought them all into Photoshop and did my usual post work routine which I describe in this earlier Bill Collector post.

That actually takes a few hours for each figure. So after about a week or so of one character per night, I was finished with the separate pieces, then I was ready to combine them all and arrange the elements.

Normally I have a very solid vision of what I want the final piece to be, but this one was kind of vague in my head. I opted to use more abstract graphic design in this one instead of making it a solid “scene” of just one moment in time.

The only thing I had in mind was to recreate the feel of a cover I did mostly by hand a few years ago. I never really liked the one I drew but I did like the concept, so that’s pretty much the only mental image I had.

I played around with this for days until it finally began to take shape. Originally, the 6 small faces of the Bill Collectors were going to lined up across the bottom, but when I saw it I thought they were coming out way too small.

To gain room and increase their size I had to abandon the plan. I wanted this one to keep its 4:3 aspect ratio in case I ever wanted to print it, so I couldn’t just widen the canvas.

**Note about printing: When I say printing here, I’m talking about printing this from one of the commercial photo/art websites like SmugMug or DeviantArt or something.

If I were to go to a commercial offset printer with this art, the bottom and right side elements would probably be too close to the edge to guarantee that they wouldn’t get chopped off at press time.

The photo printers usually don’t have this problem, but I’d still order a proof before offering it for sale just to check it out first.

So essentially, whenever you’re designing a piece, you’ve got to be thinking of what your final output is going to be, making sure to set up your bleeds and margins accordingly. Keep important elements away from those edges if you’re going to press.

If your file is “abstract” enough, meaning that you have layers and not too many flattened elements, you can always repurpose the art into a different aspect ratio and make a new file.

I keep a layered .psd (Photoshop) file that I can always go back to to make changes if necessary.

So anyway, I enlarged the side guys quite a bit. Some of the poses I used worked better than others. Marie, Samantha and Slobodan all have full body poses, but to show the whole body would have made them too small.

This is where my lax preparation bit me in the ass. Since I didn’t have a solid concept of the final piece, I kind of just made a bunch of random poses and renderings. The only one I knew for certain was Jackknife (the full-body guy with the guns).

I was too lazy to go back and render some more poses so I just decided to make do with what I had. Initially I was going to make it appear as if there were photographs laying around on a desk, but then I thought it should look more like the small faces were on a computer screen.

To that end I added some soft scan lines and really played around with the blending modes. The rounded corners on the squares was done to hopefully suggest a monitor of some sort. Although as I look at my own monitor and widescreen TV the screens themselves do not have rounded corners. Oh well…

Each square was its own Layer Set in Photoshop, plus there was extensive use of Layer Masks in each set, so it turned out using Photoshop’s align features was a bit problematic, because it sometimes used the art that was outside of the layer mask in it’s alignment calculations. This is one area where Photoshop is actually behind Illustrator and InDesign in functionality.

To get it working reliably, I had to duplicate all six of those Layer Sets (actually I combined them into another Layer Set themselves to make it quicker), then flatten each set so I could have Photoshop only use the existing art when trying to align. I duplicated the sets so I could always go back to the un-flattened ones if I wanted to change something.

So after this, the align features worked as expected. I was able to add strokes and drop shadows using Layer effects with no problems.

The main figure was not much of a problem when it came to positioning. I knew I wanted the text in the center, so I just set him off to the side to leave the space in the middle. Also I threw on a Layer Effect Stroke and reduced it’s transparency somewhat to make the figure pop a little more.

The shadow was a bit of a stumbling block. Again, since I didn’t have a solid idea of the piece when I started, I didn’t realize I wanted a shadow until much later.

My first thought was to go back into DazStudio and render the figure with a shadow. The only problem was the technique I used for my file specifically calls for setting up everything not to cast shadows.

I actually began un-doing all of that in Daz, but then I thought screw it, I’ll just fake the shadow in Photoshop. The shadow itself doesn’t have to be super-accurate.

I know there’s plugins for casting shadows that you can buy for Photoshop, but I’ve never used any of them. When I need to make a cast shadow (as opposed to the Drop Shadow you can get from Layer Effects), I just duplicate the layer I need – in this case, the layer with Jackknife on it.

Then I take the bottom layer and fill the art with black. So now I have the silhouette of the figure. At this point I use the Distort tool (EDIT > TRANSFORM > DISTORT) to force the silhouette of the figure into what I think is a fairly convincing shadow.

Once I have its basic shape, I apply a Guassian Blur to the shadow to soften up the edges, then I reduce the opacity of that layer to whatever I feel is a decent strength. This usually works out pretty good for me.

The logo I already had of course, so it was a simple matter to just drop it in from another file. I should really make a Brush out of that or a Tool Preset to make that a bit more convenient.

The “swash” behind the logo is just a piece of masking tape that I scanned and worked over a little to give it this appearance. At first I couldn’t decide if I wanted the logo to be on to of the tape, or “punched out” of the tape, with the background showing behind it.

I couldn’t really get it to look good with the punched out effect (some of that type is pretty thin), so I just went with old faithful – a slight drop shadow to lend it some depth.

Underneath that is the world map showing all the trouble spots where Bill Collector activity has bee confirmed. I like to work in that map whenever possible because I just like the way it looks.

So at this point, it’s about 80 percent finished. All that was left to do was to add in the text. I don’t care to work with text in Photoshop unless it’s very, very basic, so I saved a flattened tiff file to import into Illustrator (leaving my layered Photoshop file intact).

So now I’ve got the raster Photoshop file in Illustrator, and it’s time to set up some vector elements and type. I wanted the font to invoke a kind of government of otherwise official report, so I chose Courier New.

The great thing about working with the text in Illustrator is I have a lot more control over it. I can break it apart without making a separate layer for each piece. I was able to twist and enlarge each line of text without much hassle at all.

The white text wasn’t working out too well on it’s own, even with a drop-shadow applied, so I drew in some blocks behind the type and applied a very slight “Roughen” Live Effect to them (EFFECTS > DISTORT & TRANSFORM > ROUGHEN).

Finally I reduce the transparency of the blocks using the Transparency Palette just so they weren’t solid blobs of black on the screen.

The tiny type on the faces was kind of an afterthought. I wanted to make the text a bit less readable. I also masked it and moved some of the text slightly out of the square so minor bits were missing.

I pulled up an old vector eagle seal I’ve had for years (I actually used it on the first cover) and placed that over the top of each square to again suggest that this must be some kind of government agency interested in these guys.

So this was pretty much the end of the line here, and all that was left to be done was the exporting. These types of pieces can be a bit of an ordeal when you have to move from program to program to program, especially if you don’t have it all planned out already.

Fortunately this one turned out as good or even better than I’d hoped. Now with this done I can get back to my sequential art for the comic.

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