If i take long to create an image, it´s better for me to stop working on it and come back later. This is why the images you see here are almost identical to the finished version. Whenever i do a lot of tests sketching things for days, it´s never a good sign. It´s a sign i don´t realy know what i want to imagine. My best results appear when i have everything tought out inside my imagination before i do anything else. My imagination works like a movie and i have to have the whole film ready and edited before i put it to paper. I guess you can say i always dream up things in 16:9 then edit the images to fit the graphic novel style.
My favorite thing to draw are landscapes like this one below in a very cinematic style. These first two images belong to the second part of my graphic novel and you´ve seen a glimpse of the final color versions if you downloaded the comics preview.

The same way i never plan ahead any drawing, i do the same with any story i create. I have a general idea for the plot, i know how it begins, what has to happen in the middle to keep things moving along and how the story will end (sometimes not), but other than that i go along with my imagination and make things up as i draw each page. Most of the time even i don´t have a clue of what will happen to my heros in the next page. Believe it or not.
If i ever planned a story in detail before i made the illustrations, i would never finish anything because in my mind the story would be complete and i would already be dreaming of another. Does this makes sense ?
Maybe for many authors this would be total chaos but it´s perfect for me. This 200 page graphic novel was totaly created this way, between October 2005 and May 2006. All the line art was done non-stop in that period and the final art and coloring for the first 50 pages was completed between May and October of this year also.

This graphic novel - The Adventures of Prince Ziph - now a 200+ page saga, actualy is already the 4th version of this story. I´ve created this characters and had the idea for the Thorondor world back in 1988, almost twenty years ago. At the time i was just 18 and never expected to do anything with this other than experimenting with comics. The first version was never completed and the basic plot was extremely simple, much diferent from this current version, altough the magic book quest always was a part of the story.
In 1992 i went back to it, but i decided to improve that first infantile version and that time i did create a complete album of 50 pages. But still in black & white.
With those 50 pages i won a prize at a portuguese comics competition and the story was also published in local comics magazines. Meanwhile i went into graphic design professionaly working for a sucessful Portuguese software-house and so my comics career was put on hold long before it realy had a chance to even start.
Time was short, and it was either the uncertainty of comics or the security of a carreer in design.
While still working in graphic design, one day in 1996 i had the idea of breaking my old 50 page 1993 comics story, into several publishable small chapters and i decided to create another test version with that purpose.
Because my professional graphic design work took all my time, comics went once again on stand-by but my illustration work kept growing. Since 2001 i´ve been creating illustrations with scenes and atmospheres i wanted to use when the time was right to finaly create a professional version of my - The Adventures of Prince Ziph - and so last year it was time to put everything i´d learned to good use. This was how this new and definitive version was born.
As usual in all my versions, the concept was there, but the plot changed once again, because as i told you, i preffer to have no idea where the story goes when i´m creating this stuff and so this new version is more an update of the old themes than an actual remake of the early amateurish versions. The only thing that remained were the original characters, the magic book quest and the adventure sequence set at the City of Thieves and even that has nothing to do plotwise, with the older versions.

This version, kept most of the original characters, but many others came along as the story unfolded. Characters aren´t planned also and being so, it´s not unusual for me to come up with one just at the right time i need it to make my story advance without even thinking on it minutes before before that happens. This is because most of the time even i don´t know what happens next.
The character bellow is an exception. While creating this new 2006 professional version, i´ve worked on this drawings while listening to talk radio and there´s no show that i love most than Coast to Coast AM. A paranormal/science show created by Art Bell and now hosted by a guy called George Noory. This show endup becoming a major influence in the plot for this version of my comics. Believe me, if you´re also a Coast fan, reading my story is like a treasure hunt because of the amount of background details you´ll recognize from themes talked about on the radio. Through the years i must have listened to thousands of Coast to Coast talk radio hours + a few hundred more while working on this graphic novel all this months and so the themes in my story own much to some things i´ve listened being discussed on the Coast radio program, and when i needed a way to explain some stuff in my story and create a pause for information in the plot i had the idea of assigning a radio-show host character to fill in the role. I saw George´s photo on the website and i thought his mustache would look great on a cartoon character (sorry George), so this one down bellow is the end result. If he ever sees this, i hope he won´t use a remote viewer to cast a spell on me or something like that. ;)

All my work is done traditionaly. No computers were involved in the making of this graphic novel. Except for lettering and publishing reasons of course. All Artwork was created by hand, sketched with real pencils, inked with real wet ink and colored with sticky wet paints wich caused all sorts of painting accidents during the making of this work.
I have nothing against computer art, but for now, when comics are concerned i preffer to work traditionaly, otherwise i wouldn´t feel i was realy drawing. Besides, after 14 years of professional graphic design work, i´m totaly sick of computers and i only use them for comics if i can´t avoid them.
 

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