Roman Muradov’s Illustration and Comic Strips

Energetic, emotional brush and ink work, beautifully drawn characters, and thoughtful, dark humour, are some of the elements in Roman Muradov ‘s work. I love his illustration work on its own but his comic strips really pulled me in. Wait until you have a little time to spare for being drawn in, then head over to his comic site, where he post all his latest comic strips. Here, he goes into his work in some detail.

I’m an illustrator/cartoonist and I mainly draw with brush & ink. I try to keep my brush lines light and minimalistic with plenty of variation in line weight, density and dryness. For lettering and more static comics I sometimes use tiny pen nibs.

Every now and then I draw with pencils or directly in Photoshop/Illustrator to practice and expand my range. My major influences at this point at Nicolas Nemiri, Chris Ware, Jason, Aubrey Beardsley, Seth, Pierre Bonnard, Daniel Clowes, Raymond Queneau, Christophe Blain, Alfred Jarry and many others.

After finishing my inks I scan the b&w pieces and color them digitally. I’m pretty anal about coloring and I can often spend the whole day picking and mixing two spot colors, redoing everything a thousand times and trying to find the right balance between linework and colors. I prefer gentle, muted shades that compliment brush lines with a soft dreamlike ambiance.

For illustrations I usually do several quick & loose sketches to figure out composition and overall look, then pencil it very lightly, often limiting myself to just overall shapes and forms. I find that brush inking comes out far more dynamic and charming when the underlying sketch is less detailed. Of course it’s much easier to screw up with this approach, but that’s the price you pay for trying a sketchy, effortless look.

As for comics my process varies from story to story and page to page. Most of the time I start with a general idea, shape it into a page/number of pages and write dialogue separately. The text goes through a lot of changes and tweaks up to the inking stage, usually losing 90% of the drivel I write initially.

In short there’s plenty of improvisation and I end up redrawing entire panels and pages pretty often if I’m not happy with timing, dialogue or visual rhythm.

© Roman Muradov, 2011.