art - Chris Burnham
colour - Nathan Fairbairn
Just look at the depth on this page. One of the hardest things to do as an artist is creating a real sense of depth and Burnham here has done it on so many levels. I imagine some tweaking from Fairbairn puts the spaceship into crisp focus and giving the landscape the slightist bit of blur so that it's obvious that it's much higher up from the ground. The obvious thing is the manipulation of the landscape, doubled with the position of the the ship, forming the image of the skull, which is utterly, utterly cool, but still not what attracts me to this page. There's just a great texture here, the lack of solid blacks give the chasm even more detail and definition. Just an impeccable piece of art. I stared at this for 5 minutes before moving on with the story.
Another thing to note, though, is how the physical comic page compares to the digital. I pulled the above image from a preview of Nameless #3 on line, while below is a quick picture I took...
Notice the difference in colour on the printed page (and washed out a little more by some artificial lighting and the extra layer of a camera), but it adds a bit more warmth to the image, a further roughness to the terrain. The grain of the paper gives it added texture, and in my opinion it looks far, far better, even as a crappy photograph with light flare in the top corner.
There's a reason why I haven't gone digital. It just doesn't resonate the same. It like watching TV that auto converts programs to high def. It still works, but it doesn't look as good somehow. There is such a thing as too clean, too clear, too crisp an image. Texture gives images and story more life.
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