Creating the Art of Timawa

Creating the Art of Timawa by Gerry Alanguilan

Hello Guys! My name is Gerry Alanguilan, guest poster on komiks.i.ph, and I thought I’d post something here that I haven’t written about yet in my own blogs. And that’s how I create the artwork to my current series for The Buzz Magasin, TIMAWA.

I get two pages a month from The Buzz Magasin to do my series, and since this magazine is in a large format, I’m free to create more panels per page without necessarily crowding it up. I usually have an outline on  what happens per issue. The events in those two pages I keep percolating in my mind a few days before I actually do the art.  So by the time I actually start it, I have a pretty good idea how I’m going to lay the page out.

In this particular panel, which is Panel 1 of Timawa #2 (The Buzz Magasin November 2007), the setting is the early 70’s in a squatter area beside a railroad in Manila. One of my main characters, Lolo Tanda (who is still a young man in this panel) is sitting beside his shanty while his mother and his nephew look on at some “happening”. A kid is running towards them telling them that the bank in the corner is being held up.

I drew it loosely in pencil and then used my Rotring tech pens UNI drawing pens to actually draw the scene. I scanned this in the computer so I can color it in Photoshop. I don’t really like doing elaborate colors as I prefer, as much as possible, to do flat colors on figures and scenes this small. There is another step I will do later that would put texture on all of this, which I always keep in mind.  

When doing close ups (which I don’t have here), I usually do go in and do a little “painting” to shape the face or body, but in small figures like this, I like to keep it flat. The only real effect I do here is the sky, which I chose to use a gradient on.

Notice the orange light inside the shanty? I just chose a random bright color that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the page so it would stand out. This way, I can easily select it with a Magic Wand in Photoshop. On it I pasted another one of my drawings from another comic book I did earlier. I do this ocassionally to add a little background. in ELMER I did this using drawings of Elmer sent in by friends and readers of the comic book.

After I finish coloring, I add on some texture over the entire page. The texture comes from this:

This is a portion of a high resolution scan of the back of a Nestor Redondo original artwork from the mid 1960’s. Manipulating it in Photoshop I can bring out some nice textures and folds and dirt. I then paste this over my colored Timawa page, and playing around with Opacity and other options in the Layers, I can choose just how much of this texture I want to show up. And the result is on the third panel above. I truly get a kick knowing that my comics carries the “spirit” so to speak, of Nestor Redondo, who remains one of my biggest inspirations.

The lettering is all done on the computer, using a font I created from my own lettering. But that’s a topic for another post.