I'm the creator of The Earth Blues Series, an ecologically conscious collection of futuristic and fantastic comics inspired by climate change. Some of the titles are Marghera Blues, about two mermaids that lived in a toxic lagoon until humans mysteriously vanished; Forehead Blues minicomic, about a man who turned into an outlaw after losing his money in Venice; and Salamanca Blues, in which the main characters escape from an ancient Spanish city that has fallen under the power of a sect worshiping enormous lizards. I self-published Salamanca Blues last year via crowdfunding and I'm currently working on the long-form comic of Forehead Blues.
This is my first-long form comic Salamanca Blues which I self-published in 2022 with a crowdfunding campaign in Indiegogo. Behind the comic, stickers and Fine Art prints I designed for the campaign.
I'm a member of WIP Comics group and participated in two of their anthologies with my comics The Lucky Horn and MoonFall. I'm one of the Broken Frontier's 6 to Watch Artists 2022 and a regular of the Broken Frontier and Gosh's Drink&Draws events, you can see here a selection of my cartoon panels.
The Lucky Horn is an unfolding comic and it's part of the Lucky WIP Anthology 2021. MoonFall is a one-page comic, it is part of WIP XL Anthology 2022 which is printed in newspaper format.
You can find out more about my comics on my comics website, but as this is my visual development portfolio, you can view a glimpse of the work I've done in this area below.
SCRIPT AND STORY
Making comics allows me to control all the creative and editorial process. It gives me the chance to establish a plot, write a script, storyboard concepts, design characters and settings, and then paint the final renderings. Once I have an idea for a story, I write it down, make notes, and do research about the subjects, locations, or whichever aspect may help me give consistency to the script. For example, for my comic Marguera Blues, I researched a lot about the real chemical plant in Porto Marghera (Venice, Italy), where I took inspiration. Looking into the archive of Italian newspapers from the 1970s helped me understand the huge damage that the chemical plant did to the Venetian lagoon and the citizens of Marghera over the years.
When I developed the idea of what I'm going to write about, I storyboard the script with very rough sketches to visually develop the story. Below you can see the preliminary sketches I've done for Salamanca Blues:
PAGE LAYOUT AND COMPOSITION THUMBNAILS
I also do thumbnail studies of the panels to determine and refine their composition. I normally do this in Photoshop and use very simple shapes and no more than three of the four shades of grey. Below are some examples of page thumbnails I made for Salamanca Blues:
FROM SKETCHES TO THE FINAL PAGE
Once I finished the script and thumbnailed the panels, I draw the pages in detail and do the line art. Sometimes I do this by hand with brushes and ink, other times I draw digitally in Sketchbook Pro. Below there's an example of School Walk, Marghera Blues and Salamanca Blues.
CHARACTER DESIGNS
I normaly start designing the characters while writing the script of my comics. The one below is a turnaround of The Old Punk lady from my comic Angel People:
And these are some of the studies I've done to design the characters of my comic Marghera Blues
if you'd like to find out more about my comics you can also read the behind-the-scene article I wrote for Broken Frontier, where I give in-depth insight about the research and creative process I did to create Salamanca Blues, you can read it here.
