Anyone out there hear of the comic strip Dunce by Jens K. Styve? If you haven’t that is completely understandable seeing that Jens is Norwegian and the comic strip is primarily syndicated in Norway and Europe, BUT that’s why you read my blog, for all of the cool things you’re missing!
Jens and I met in NYC at the MoCCA Arts Festival and I’ve been following his english translated comic Dunce ever since, you can find it HERE on Instagram. He even featured me as a guest in his comic about his first visit to The Big Apple, I think it’s great and mostly true too!
Now down to business! He’s currently running a Kickstarter for his newest collection of comic strips, this one featuring Brego, his dog, as the main inspiration, check it out HERE and consider backing it if it suits your fancy. I’m a friend and fan of this guy and his work so I wanted to contribute something, fan-art wise, and he invited me to create a guest cover, the image at the top of this article. Let me show you how it was created!
I always start with sketches in a Moleskine notebook, filling up the pages as I try to work out how to draw someone else’s characters. A pretty difficult thing to do I’m realizing as I’ve progressed past more than 100 pages of Joe Death. I’m realizing there’s just so much about a character design and all of the different expressions and poses that’s unique to the main artist, the creator. Specifically, the Dunce characters all have wonderful expressions that would take me quite awhile to duplicate or learn for myself, so I chose a few key ones to experiment with and then started to develop an idea that would work as a comic/book cover.
After sketching the characters I start thinking about their context on a book cover. One of the best ways to make a book cover is to look at other book covers you like. I have several Pinterest boards devoted to books, comics, posters, design, etc. These are places that I’ve been collecting images for times like this, when I need them. I love pulp science fiction material and C.S. Lewis, so this book cover I thought would make a great starting point. I thought it interesting that there were three characters looking out a spaceship at something, my initial idea being to have Brego as a constellation formation outside, maybe suggesting that he’s swallowing the coronavirus. Timely imagery…but Dunce is very timely as well, dealing with current events, so I thought this was a good enough place to start. I mocked up a new cover based on the old book in the new format/size that Jens sent me with his logo, below. The result of the mock up below wasn’t all that impressive to me, but I trust the process and knew I could change the idea later, I just needed a place to start for the illustration.
What you see below are my steps, left to right of making the drawings for this cover. 1) Trace the figures and setting from the Out of the Silent Planet cover. 2, 3, 4, 5) trace and refine on layout bond paper. You can see it below, the proof that I am a hack and I just polish until everything is working to my satisfaction. I hope this is illuminating and liberating to new illustrators, you don’t have to be fully formed with your own genius once you finish “formal education.” It’s my opinion that you just have to work hard and learn from others.
Steps 6, 7) are also tracing but using pro marker paper. Bond and marker paper are both translucent enough for me to trace without a light-box, something I’ve always hated using. I also just traced the inside and outside elements of the spaceship separately since I knew I would have to separate them in photoshop later anyway. Brego is basically the Pepé Le Pew Looney Toon character here, awestruck in love with a beautiful alien dog.
Now I transform into a Computerist as I scan my final lines into Photoshop, clean them up and begin “inking” there, then adding the flat color and the separate elements outside the spaceship. There are multiple in-depth videos on my Youtube explaining my color approach.
At this point, having the final illustration I had a sinking suspicion that my original paperback book plan wasn’t going to compliment this image. My illustration felt too “comic” and less like a painted paperback illustration, they would feel at odds when placed together. But that was very alright seeing that I liked the final illustration, I knew I could find some other parody solution. Weird Science was the obvious choice after looking for a little while. The Dunce: Brego logo that Jens gave me was already bold and stacked just like the Weird Science title. So I mimicked the typography choices in photoshop and added a few of the same marks around it.
Check out my Youtube channel to see and hear more about my process as well as Jens and I discussing cartooning. Here’s the video:
