How I Draw Stuff 3

Hey, Jazz Pickles and Peyote Cowpokes, response to my "How I Draw Stuff" series has been very enthusiastic and I really enjoy doing them, so here’s another! I hope it pleases you.

This one features illustrations from my graphic novel, Peyote Cowboy, again and it is a bit special because it is actually the last two frames of the most recent episode I posted last week— but I left these images out of the post. On purpose! Chapter 8, Episode 5 is titled, "Holy Chicken Shit" and ended with the frame below.

That episode actually goes on for two more frames but since I hadn't started the art for them yet and I wanted to post, I went ahead without them. I've now added them to the website at the end of that episode that I linked to above.

And not only are these the final frames of that chapter and episode, but they also wrap up the first full day that our hero has spent in this trippy town. We've been stringing it along for months so it seems like longer, but it's only been one day! The next images I draw will be the following morning.

Let's get to it. Here's my first rough sketch of the end of episode 5.

It's going to be a distance shot of the burned-out church as it crumbles to the ground and the congregation turns from watching the "river of the dead" to looking toward the church.

The final shot is a woman holding up a scorched chicken, announcing the beginning of the nightly ritual feast. I thought this might make a good composition to have her frame hanging onto the corner of the other.

Drawing all those little characters took me a while but it was as fun as it was tedious. The church is looking okay, I guess, but I'm not bowled over yet. I'm hoping it looks more convincing as I go along.

It's sunset of day one and this scene is taking place just moments before dark, so the people are lit by the fire still glowing in the church and have black shadows across their backsides. That's always a dramatic comics effect and one I probably don't use enough.

I also started inking the screaming lady. She looks kind of okay, I guess, but I'm not sure about her yet. That mouth is too Halloweeny, for one.

The rest of her and the chicken look fine but I've not resolved her mouth yet.

I was worried about how I was going to draw a chicken that was burned alive—that's not something you can find a lot of photo reference for on the web (and if you can, I don't want to see it.) I think I did a decent job of portraying it in cartoon language.

Readers have been telling me they're enjoying how I'm giving different fonts to all the characters and I'm happy about that. Since this lady won't be a recurring character, I've decided to go with a hand-drawn version of a fancy western font for her voice balloon. I think it's fun.

I've not indicated any smoke coming off of the church yet because I'm planning to do all that on the color layer. So far I've just been concerned with the black line work.

Yay! It's time for color!

Now we've got some color and I'm very happy with the overall feel of that top panel. It's a good start, anyway, and gives me confidence that I'm heading in the right direction.

Oh, man, I really love the way the burned framework of the church is starting to look! I experimented with some little orange airbrush flames along the edges and I think it's totally convincing. Sometimes you just get lucky.

I also darkened that one mountain and I think that works really well, too. I'm hoping that the orange whisps rising up will mix nicely with the smoke and look more realistic than just gray smoke puffs might.

I've also put a little color into the river, which you probably didn't even notice was there before now.

I did quite a few things in this step and I'm super excited by the results. I got rid of the black line work around the mountains and let them stand as colored blocks. I played around with smoke on top of my orange whisps and am very satisfied with how it's turning out!

Another important touch in this step is the long shadows the people are casting. For my money, that kind of thing really doubles the drama of the lighting. More subtle but also important are the ground shadows I added to the opposite riverbank on the left. It helps to make it look like weakly-lit, rough terrain disappearing into the dark.

I also added some subtle color shifts to the river. I'm going to color the old lady next.

Okay, the other old lady face was probably fine but for some reason when I tried to add color to it, it just got more and more witchy-looking, which wasn't my intention. I hated it, got frustrated, and dumped it. Here's the first sketch of a new face.

The deal is that I don't want the people of this church to seem like wicked psychos, really. I want them to be more like fanatics are in real life, who are usually normal folks who get caught up in a culture that sweeps them up into something they might not otherwise consider rational. Once the culture at large adopts something, most people will go along with it, that's just how social animals behave. We've all seen dramatic examples of that recently in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Here's the final inked version. I made some tiny adjustments you might catch if you've got a sharp eye: larger chest, shorter neck, moved her head back a few ticks, and made her bonnet a skosh smaller. Let's see if she turns into a witch when I start to color her.

I guess she looks okay, although the lighting does give her a certain witchiness that's probably unavoidable.

I was tempted to call this page finished but then I got the feeling that the old lady was taking too much attention away from the burning church scene, so I decided to separate them and let the church scene stand on its own.

I added a few more tiny spots of flame to the church and blurred the edge of the most distant mountain to give it a touch more depth. I also lightened the old lady's face because it was still bugging me.

People often ask how long these things take. This entire process took me maybe 12 hours over a period of three days. All of it is drawn start to finish in Photoshop on a Wacom Cintiq 22.

If you’d like to become a Peyote Cowpoke and support this project while I work toward getting it published as a book, you can watch my pitch video and look into options here.

If you’d like to be on our Peyote Cowboy mailing list and get an email whenever I post a new episode, you can do that here.