I'm alive!

Tri Vuong

09 Apr 2025 • 2 min read

Hi everyone,

Apologies for the radio silence for the last several months. Freelance work and Big Dreamers (the graphic novel that's coming out through Editions Dupuis) has been keeping me busy lately. The book is nearly finished and I'm excited to share more artwork from the project soon. In the meantime, I thought I'd share with you some process stuff for a rejected cover for the book:

I usually start every illustration with little thumbnail drawings. I like to go with at least 3 options to begin with.

More detailed layouts to flesh out a couple of the thumbnails. Faces are optional.

Rough pencils and the tighter pencils. I'm not sure if everybody needs to draw in this many layers but I find it impossible to make pretty drawings right away..

And then finally inks. The drawing usually doesn't look good until this stage.

And voila, the final colours! At which point we realized the image wasn't really what we wanted for the cover.

So there you go. In the end, we ended up with a pretty pleasant image but one in which we felt didn't make the best cover. There probably was some way to make this idea work but I think something was lost in the translation from rough layout to finished work.

It's never easy to toss work aside but sometimes that's just the way the cookie crumbles. Sometimes you just have to go down the wrong path before you end up on the right one.

So there you have it! I hope you found that interesting.

In other news, work has begun on a new Oscar Zahn story! I'll start documenting my writing and design process starting with the next newsletter but in the meantime here's a sneak peek:

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

Tri