Brotherhood of Broken Men – Scott A. Story

I am tentatively done with the cover of The Brotherhood of Broken Men. I’ll post it here soon in its completed form, because now I need to go back and do my final edit on the book manuscript it goes with.

This painting has been epic in its own right. It began as a pen-and-ink drawing, then became a line-and-wash painting, and now it has graduated to a large scale (18” x 24”) acrylic painting. This is the second largest painting I’ve ever done, and I’ve been at it for three weeks straight.

I filmed the whole process, from beginning to end, and I learned a lot about my process as I worked. First, I painted and repainted several sections up to three time to get the colors I wanted. Turns out, even through I had a line-and-wash study to work from, I should have collected pictorial examples of all the colors I was aiming for. It would have saved me a lot of time.

Then, I discovered that some acrylic colors will dry darker than how they appeared as I painted them on. Ouch. Not sure how I’ll figure that one out.

Then, for every hour of video I spent painting, that called for about two hours of editing. When sped up eight times for viewing, that edited video turned out to be five to eight minutes of real-time viewing. Three weeks of work will have boiled down to three videos each about ten minutes long. The first video is already posted, and it’s eleven minutes in duration.

Can recording one’s painting process and then painstakingly editing it make one a better painter?

I’m going to go with Yes. Watching my own tedious process has taught me a great deal about which brushes to use, glazing, color mixing, and resourcing correct references. It has also given men a lot of time with the painting to consider every detail and make it better.

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Scott Story

Scott Story is a freelance illustrator and cartoonist who lives in the Midwestern USA. He has been involved in the comic industry since 1992, and webcomics since 2004. He has drawn comics for dozens of publishers including Image, Amp, Arrow, Digital Webbing, Arcana, Spinner Rack Comics, and many others.

Scott is known for the rich detail, clever storytelling, and organic quality to his art. As a cartoonist, Scott is an all-purpose creator– he writes, pencils, inks, colors, letters and designs. Scott Story has also done advertising art; covers for books, CDs and tabletop games; movie, event and concert posters; interior art for tabletop games; logos and website graphics; and a wide range of other media. Scott was trained in traditional media, such as acrylics and water colors, but now he divides his time between the traditional and digital art worlds. He is in demand for his digital painting skills, used on covers, posters and prints.

As the creative director of Story Studios LLC., he has published two graphic novels, Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father, and Johnny Saturn: Homeland Insecurity, with two more in the process of being completed. Story Studios has also published seventeen comics, a sketchbook, and a pinup book. He has written articles for Blueline Pro’s Sketch Magazine, and prose stories for print anthologies and the web. His webcomic, Johnny Saturn, is a past winner of the Webcomics Readers Choice Awards, and Scott was a speaker at the prestigious Graphic Engagement academic conference hosted by the Purdue University Comparative Literature Program.

Scott is a member of the Indy Webcomic Group, and he was the creator and a founding member of the highly successful Collective of Heroes, a juried collective of indie superhero webcomics.