I met
Clement Sauve once in person at San Diego Comic Con -- had no knowledge of his work prior. Needless to say, I was blown away, and he immediately skyrocketed to the top of my influence list. In the coming year, I began a correspondence with him, and was amazed by how giving, insightful and encouraging a person he was.
Clem, I learned today, recently died of cancer. He was 33.
Below are some snippets of things he wrote to me, which I feel are good for the community read in order to better understand his work and how he went about executing it so deftly. You can tell by his tone that he was as good humored and humble as he was driven. It's my hope that, as we mourn this substantial loss, other resources will emerge to help those of us who didn't know him nearly well enough in life become better acquainted with the artist and the man.
My name is pronounced SO-VEY, but don't feel bad, nobody manages to pronounce it correctly. And yes, I get Suave a LOT, including in credits, con badges and checks....
There's not exactly a big design industry here since Ubisoft and EA have only been around for the last few years and all my friends and the local artists I know work in comics in the US and Europe, so I'm slowly figuring out how to do this on my own, and I've only started doing color work for designs last year. I wouldn't say that the couple of years I spent penciling comics have been misspent, but I wish I had fallen in the design industry sooner because it's helped me grow a lot quicker than comics have.
I do work from enlarged thumbnails, and you're not the first one to be surprised by how loose the end result ends up despite me "tracing" thumbnails, but there's no big secret behind it. I just don't do the thumbnails tight enough that I could trace them. I just do the basic shape and pose of the character, and I leave myself a whole lot of room for actual object and details. It allows me to fill entire 11 by 17 pages of little designs really quick, then just blow up and print the ones I want. I started doing that for the Transformers gig, cause they wanted a lot more variations than i was used to, and I needed to find a quick way to figure out if a design worked or not. I thought the technique worked well, so I've been using it since then. As for the designs themselves, they're a direct results of reading "making of" Star Wars books and listening to commentaries for animated series and movies. Basically, I want the design to be unique enough that you could recognize it just by looking at an outline drawing of it. It works well for Star Wars ships and Simpsons characters, so I use the same principle. Of course sometimes, sadly, the clients don't allow enough freedom to do that, as you surely know, but I still try to muscle in as much input as I can.
...my friends were singing the praises of Manga Studio's inking tools. The best I could come up with was "I don't want something that flattens out every single imperfection. I'm illustrating an idea, no making a Kanye West record."
