Tribute to Sergio Toppi

RIP Sergio Toppi (October 11, 1932 - August 21, 2012)

Today, one of my favorite artists passed away. So as soon as I heard that, I went to the studio and started sketching while I was looking at his awesome illustrations and sequential pages in my tiny smartphone. As I promised, this blog will 'record' my process rather than only display my final art so for this one, you might see it as it is, no Photoshop magic, no touch up, no nothing.

Here you see I was already halfway inking the head --I almost forgot to take picture!-- on top of my blue/pencil lines. Usually, I don't like using the blue pencil because when you ink on top of blue lines, they sort of get in the way or make the ink not absorbed/distributed well on the paper and it drives me nuts. 

The tools I was using were Rotring rapidograph 0.25 --one of my favorite. I like it better than soft tip tech pens because it makes a single line weight no matter how much pressure you put. I think for technical stuff, Rotring and marupen are always my first choice(s). Well, a head is not actually a technical stuff but Rotring gives me the nice steady line weight I need for this illustration. As you can see, the pencil lines are pretty rough but I put more details for the eyes and face. 

 I went on with my Rotring rapidograph 0.5 to make thicker lines on the weird collar thingy and marupen to for the more thicker likes near the shoulder and sleeves. As the black area, I used my 'ol faithful Raphael 8404 #2. As the black area turned into white, I used marupen to create different line weights. I like marupen since it can created line weight as easy as it will give you a steady, nicely distributed line weight if you have a steady-light hand --which I happen to have.

After I was done doing the gradation, I didn't really like it --too bad I forgot to take picture of the first version I did -- so I just went in again with my brush and black almost all of the coat/shirt. Luckily,that also help me to pop out the fingers/hand better. The mark makings I did on the fingers were kinda tricky but I tried t do my best with it. I used various tools here back and forth; from Rotring 0.25 to Raphael 8404 #2.

When I roughed out the background, I did the overall outline of the fortress then I drew several random horizontal and vertical lines using my mechanical pencil (Rotring --I'm a sucker for this brand). After that, I went in with Rotring 0.25 for the outline of the bricks then for the fine lines inside the brick (the textures of the bricks), I used marupen. When I was done with all the texture, I went back in with Rotring 0.5 and or marupen to thicken some part of the bricks.

Here's the final one after I cleaned it and did some level adjustments in Photoshop.