Creating Comics!

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(Text)

Title: Fat and Binging

Client: Hoodoo Gurus

Media: Pen and pencil on paper, Photoshop

Creative Process

This illustration parodies a song by popular Australian

rock band Powderfinger, changing the original lyrics so

they refer to overeating. The client being MAD Magazine,

the early pencil sketches were naturally of absurd fat

stereotypes. The original drawing for this piece is about

16

1

/2” x 11

3

/4” (42 x 30 cm). I created a clean pencil

sketch on bond paper, and then inked it. After scanning

the art into Photoshop, correcting it, converting it to vector

art in Illustrator, and coloring it, I placed a mask around

the image to give it a clean edge.

Ben Brown

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Creating Comics

B

en Brown is a Sydney-based designer and

artist. Brown loved drawing from a young

age. He created t-shirt designs, posters, and

record covers for the underground music scene before

receiving commissions from Nirvana, Fatboy Slim,

Mudhoney, and others.

Brown loves surfing, and has designed merchandise

and clothing for Insight, Rip Curl, O’Neill, and Globe. For

five years he penned the strip Grubb for Tracks surfing

magazine. Brown currently does a comic strip for the

Australian surfing magazine Stab. His work has also

appeared in the Australian versions of Rolling Stone,

Penthouse, and MAD Magazine. He illustrated the

children’s book Sid Surfasaurus.

Brown’s art most recently appeared in the Monster

Children Gallery and the MTV Gallery Space in Sydney,

and at Tower Records in Tokyo. His solo showing of rock

posters, “Seduction of the Innocent,” appeared in the

Space Junk Gallery in Sydney in late 2005. Brown works

in the Sydney suburb of Manly and lives with his wife

Janina, son Harrison Leroy Brown, and dog Patterson.

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Job:05-19413 Title:Creating Comics

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(Text)

Title: Fat and Binging

Client: MAD Magazine (Australian)

Media: Pen and pencil on paper, Photoshop

Title: Fat and Binging

Client: MAD Magazine (Australian)

Media: Pen and pencil on paper, Photoshop

Ben Brown

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Ben Brown

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Job:05-19413 Title:Creating Comics

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(Text)

Title: Carbon Trash

Client: MAD Magazine (Australian)

Media: Pen and pencil on paper, Photoshop, Illustrator

Title: The Magic Eightball

Client: Stab magazine (Rolling Youth Publications)

Media: Pen and pencil on paper, Photoshop, Illustrator

This illustration is from a double-page spread in MAD Maga-

zine mocking the new practice of carbon offsets. The trailer

trash family has its own environmental “tips,” which

were placed around the illustration. The brief was for a color

image of the family in front of their mobile home.

I created two separate images, one of the trailer and one of

the family. Both were roughed up in pencil before I did a clean

final pencil version and inked it. After cleaning up and convert-

ing to vector art in Illustrator, I colored the images and placed

them into a new file sized to the double-page specifications.

Using layers, I placed the family in front of the mobile home

and added some backgrounds to bleed out under the copy.

[To the right] is the first page of a five-page strip about surfing

superstar Kelly Slater. The copy came from a storyboard I’d

created to determine the layout and structure of the strip. The

opening frame has Slater brooding in his Florida mansion about

the outcome of the surfing world title. I decided to use a full-

page frame for impact, sketching up some pencil roughs.

First, I did the illustration without copy or titles. Then, I ruled

up a page on A2 bond paper and did a clean pencil version

before inking it with a #3 or #4 sable brush and drawing ink.

I used a felt-tip Artline 0.6 pen to tighten up the final inking. I

scanned all the inked art into the computer as grayscale JPEG

files in Photoshop. Next, I freehanded titles and copy on sepa-

rate pieces of paper and scanned those in.

After making adjustments to contrast and cleaning up the

image in Photoshop, I opened the image in Illustrator and used

the tracing feature to convert the drawings into vector art. I

placed the black key line on one layer and colored the image

underneath the key line with a separate one. I also created a

layer for titles and copy. I scaled the image before placing it

into a new canvas with the correct size and specifications.

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Creating Comics

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