Teaser App

For our Teaser App we asked a great Italian artist to give us a hand. A true master of ink and color: Gigi Cavenago.

Born in 1982, Gigi studied at Scuola del Fumetto (Comics School) in Milan and at the ‘Istituto Arti Grafiche Rizzoli’. His career breakthrough was in 2005 on the magazine Strike with a short story titled ‘Predatore Naturale’ (Natural Predator). From there he moved to a new series of Jonathan Steele. Gigi then worked on the mini series ‘Dr Vodoo’ written by Giovanni Gualdoni.

In the meanwhile Gigi works in as a advertisement publishing illustrator for various publishers including Cetem, Mondadori, Masson.

Gigi is currently working on a new mini series written by Roberto Recchioni and Emiliano Mammuccari, published by Sergio Bonelli Editore where he already worked on the mini series ‘Cassidy’.

We asked Gigi a few questions about his experience working on a DeepComix.

DeepComix: How hard was it to adapt your working methodology for DeepComix?

Gigi: It was quite easy. I have been working completely digitally for the last few years and I am used to separate different layers so that I can freely reposition each element of the scene inside the panel. This is the main requirement for DeepComix so for somebody who is used to working digitally the process will feel quite natural.

If you were to start theprocess with a more traditional approach, you would have to separate layers at some point, which is very doable but at some point you will need to jump into Photoshop or something similar.

DeepComix: Did your approach to space change in any way?

 Gigi: In some sense yes. While I normally separate my images into three main levels: foreground, middle ground and background, working on DeepComix you immediately realise that the number of levels goes up significantly: each element can be decomposed in more layers. Not only environments, but also characters and sound effects.

DeepComix: How about the colorization?

Gigi: Colorization has, to some extent, been the most challenging part. This is because black and white images were already separated into layers each one of which required at least three layers for the color. This meant that my files got big and complex, but just like with the drawing as soon as I defined my methodology it was just a matter of keeping focused. 

DeepComix: Did you work exclusively digitally? Which tools do you use?

Gigi: With the exception for a few environments with a very strong perspective, I have worked exclusively digitally, with my dear old  Photoshop Version 7.0 and a Wacom tablet.

Gigi: It is still a comic as it is still based around a fixed sequence of images. The images are not fixed any more, but the actions they represent are still fixed and still acquire a meaning only as a part of a sequence.

Gigi: Great! Once I got the basic principle it is just a matter of keeping focused on what is required and wait for the DeepComix guys to do their magic. All you have to do then is to wait for the final result! This is the first time that I see one of my artworks come to life.