The Making of Dracula
Meets The Wolfman - Pagina Terza
by Francesco Francavilla
Dracula meets the Wolfman is one of the coolest paintings of Frank Frazetta, the other ones being all of his other paintings ;) You can imagine how excited I was when I got involved on this project: just the idea to get this close to one of the idols of my childhood (and I still feel like a child right now ;)) was mind-blowing. Thank you so much, Jay Fotos, Nat Jones, and Steve Niles, for giving me this opportunity: grazie mille, ragazzi! :).
When Rob Caprilozzi (our very own BigBadWolf) asked me to do a little art feature about the book, I was very happy: sadly, because of my busy schedule, I am not that active on these boards, but I love the people here so I was happy to do something for the feature.
The story is about 2 classic icons of the Horror genre, so I didn't have to do lots of pre-production design. Mostly I wanted for my wolfman to be very animal looking and, mostly, moving. You will see him chasing a horse moving like any other wolf, using all 4 limbs, as you can see in the above concept art I did when we first started on the project.
I did a full transformation a year ago just for fun and animated it http://www.francescofrancavilla.com/gallery/werewolf.html, but for the comics I have to rely on a series of frames (not many) to show the effect of the full moon over our poor lycanthrope. Because of the limited amount of pages, we introduce the wolfman at the very beginning on page 3.
And here is how it works:
1. I first read the script and try to visualize the possible scenarios and layout of the page.
2. I do a very rough pencil layout of the page. These pencils are done on 11x17 paper, which is the final size of the artwork. I had the idea to break the streamlined panel cage of the page to give a little more power to the transformation. I also like to hand-draw as many SFX as I can in my books, so I can use them as graphic element and not just as SFX.
3. Usually I do a tighter version of the pencils before the inks, but in this case I went to ink straight on the rough pencils as I was tight on time (I was also drawing a book of Zorro at the same time ;)). Inks are done with brush, India ink on bristol paper. As you can see , I did a few changes from the pencil sketch, the face of the wolfman in the large panel being the more noticeable. Doing these changes straight in ink is always a bet, but luckily it turned out good, I think ;)
4. I do the washes adding more mood to the page.
5. After scanning the original artwork, I bring it in Corel Painter for some toning/coloring. The idea is to give an old paper, sepia tone.
Finally Jay do a little tweaks to the tone and this is the page you will see in the book :).
The book is out in August
and you might want to pre-order it so you make sure you get a copy of it
;)
Pre-order code is JUN08 2222. Hope you guys enjoy it and
I will see you all on the forums :)
Cheers,
Francesco
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