Tim Eldred art gallery
I’ve had the tremendous luck of having created Votoms art as both an amateur and a professional, from ‘zines and APAs to comics and box art. The full range is collected here, except for interior comic book pages – which I’ll get to in another article.
This piece was done for Animag issue 12 in 1991. I drew it in ink, and my comics partner at the time Steve Krueger went at it with airbrush.
Here’s how it appeared in the magazine. The right side was crooked because of a printing screwup by the publisher. I corrected it here so you can see how crooked it was.
Another rando. I don’t remember what I did this for. Maybe an ad idea for the VHS tapes from US Manga Corps?
Wraparound cover art for Votoms #1 from CPM Comics/US Manga Corps, 1996. By the time I landed this dream assignment, I was adept at digital coloring and took full advantage of it for my technique. This was the largest Photoshop file I’d ever created at that point, and I had to delete EVERYTHING from my computer except Photoshop in order to complete it. My hard drive had a capacity of only 500Mb back then…
When I produced the cover art for issue 3, I did a breakdown of my process for an APA I was involved with. Here’s what I wrote, so you don’t have to read it sideways…
On these two pages are an example of how artwork is affected by the “digital revolution.” Together, these pieces comprise the cover of Votoms #3, due out in stores in September. Because all the coloring is done in Photoshop on the computer, I can take advantage of the digital nature of the job to achieve special effects that just aren’t possible with ink and paint.
If you see Votoms #3 on the shelf, you’ll see how much the art is enhanced by digital color, but I’ll explain how it came together. The most important feature is the “layering” function in Photoshop. With it, you can work with art as if it was separated onto animation cels. The background can be on one layer, your foreground can be on another, and you can pile on extra elements in as many layers as your computer can handle. It’s a bit like compositing bluescreen elements in an optical printer when doing effects shots in a movie.
On this page are the “special effects” elements I added to the artwork to enhance it. The linework at the top was placed over the figure and colorized to look like a marker rendering. All the little pen marks at the bottom were placed over the robots and colored white to look like metallic glints. The bursts were filled in solid and placed over the guns to be the flash of firing bullets. The linework way down at the bottom was placed behind the robots to serve as the ground. Various bits and pieces were combined in different ways to get the exact look I wanted. I was even able, a few months later, to redrew parts of the robots, scan them, color them, and drop right in over the original piece…an editing step I could never do without the computer.
Finished cover for issue 3, 1996. Since issue 3 was never published, it ended up as the cover of the Supreme Survivor graphic novel.
Box art for DVD sets from NuTech, 2001
