In my graphic novel Salamanca Blues I imagined how life could be in a distant future in Spain once most of its land has become a desert. The story starts in the ruins of Salamanca where a religious order controls the population with fear and superstition.
I actually lived the first three years of my BA in Fine Arts in Salamanca so I'm very familiar with its architecture and climate. It's a gorgeous city made of golden stones and its very hot in summer.
These are some of the early concept art paintings I did to visualize the mood, lighting and colour palettes of the environments for my story. The buildings I painted are inspired by real buildings of Salamanca.
Companía Street and Clerecía Church.
Salamanca Cathedrals are in the background.
I'm fascinated by the lizards and enormous insects that there are in Salamanca and these are very important in my comic story. I got inspired by the Ocellated Lizard to design one of the main creatures of my comic:
For a start, I painted a very realistic Ocellated Lizard to understand its anatomy and main features.
I painted the Ocelated Lizard in the context of my story.
As I developed the script further, I decided that I didn't want a serious and realistic look for my story. I wanted a touch of humor and a stylized look for my characters, creatures and environments so I worked further on the lizard to design one with a more unique look:
I liked the previous lizard studies were but they didn't reflect the mood that I wanted so I developed further the design and here you can see the final lizard in one of the panels of my comic:
I wrote an article for Broken Frontier where I give in-depth insight about the research and creative process I used to create Salamanca Bllues, you can read it here.
I worked a lot on the characters of this story. Here you can see the early studies I did to design the main protagonists: the hunter, the illusionist and the priest.
Below there's a selection of the character expressions that are already on the final pages of my comic. Here you can also see the final look of the three protagonists:
I prepared the following sequence of images to show how I created one of my final comic pages: the initial sketch, the composition thumbnail study, and the final rendered page with the line art that I drew in Spetchbook Pro and the final colouring I did in Photoshop.
Salamanca Blues Part 1: Sand is finished and I self-publiched it with a crowdfunding. You can read a review of my comic by Andy Oliver from Broken Frontier here
