Retail Therapy

The problems with comic shops have been discussed by many a consumer in hopes that someday something will change and these retailers will get a clue how to run a welcoming comic shop. I have my share of bad comic shop experiences as I'm sure all of you do as well. There are a few decent ones, but overall I think we can all agree there are many things that could be so much better.

Well Chuck Kennedy also agrees. For several weeks now, Chuck has been sharing his views on the topic in a column titled Retail Therapy at TheComicsReview.com. Chuck has researched the topic and has a lot of great ideas that would go a long way in helping retailers make their shops more consumer friendly if heeded and implemented.

When Chuck landed the column he asked if we knew anyone who could make a banner. I volunteered to letter it (or he may have asked me, I don't recall which) and had a friend I was going to get to illustrate an idea I had for it.

Unfortunately the artist got super busy, and I kind of got the urge to take a crack at it myself. So I did! Chuck hasn't seen this yet, so I'm not sure if he'll like it. I know there are some problems, mainly with perspective, that I can see very clearly. I also know it's rather large for a banner. It didn't start off that way, but once I realized the way I had it made the character on the right look like a giant I had to move things around in photoshop.

Anyway, I'm not looking for people to be amazed by this by any means. I just wanted to have fun with it and give it a whimsical feel. What I am proud of, though, is how the technique I used turned out.

I started with a pencil drawing of the two characters and the counter only. Then I scanned them in, moved them around a bit, enlarged and printed them off. I then inked the piece, and repeated the previous step.

I then colored the piece by hand with water color pencils. Then I scanned it back in and overlayed all the colors with the base color of each area set to varying transparency levels.

I then added some manipulated photos (nothing copywritten that I'm aware of) including four "covers" of my upcoming projects on the back wall. I set a transparent light blue over the counter and added a plastic wrap filter to make it look like glass, textured the wall and then saved.

I then went into Illustrator and added the lettering, and voila!

If you comment be gentle. It's far from perfect, full of flaws, but all in all I think it's decent and was a ton of fun:


Click the title of this post to read Chuck's column where (hopefully) this banner will soon be placed.

B-Out