Page 4 complete

I finally finished the painting for page 4. I especially had fun with the bottom left panel. Here is the first shot we get of the cave beasts. I like the darks around her. I always like getting nice darks with watercolor. I'm often tentative to go real dark, but once I do I'm always happier. I could go darker everywhere, but all those layers slows me down. It's fun to start seeing this story come together.

I was taking a long time painting each panel because I didn't have a color template for the boy, so I had to figure out which colors to use for him each panel. To help with this I made a quick color sketch of him and wrote down the colors I used for each part of him. Now I just paint by numbers, basically. Much faster.

I've not done a final color design for any of my characters yet. I was going to kind of figure them out as I go along. The next main character I'm introducing is Robel. I've got his design down, but not his colors. I now know to do a color sketch first.

Now on to pencilling the next page.

A new year.

It is 2010. Happy New Year.

I have made two resolutions. One is that I will draw every day. Sometimes I can go weeks without picking up a pencil. My twenty year old self would never have thought a day would pass without drawing, but the computer has stolen a lot of my passion away. I became soft. Disconnected.

Well I'm back with a vengeance.

The other resolution is that I will work on my comic every day. I barely touched it in December. I get this real stuipid thing going that I feel like I need hours of time free to work on my comic. Painting takes a lot of setup and breakdown usually, but now I've got it down to a science. It takes me all of ten seconds to get ready and twenty seconds to clean up after myself. Even if I'm only able to sit down for a half hour to work on my comic, it is worth the time.

So here's where I'm at so far with Page 4. Almost halfway though painting I realized that I'd forgotten to draw the boy's staff in the top two panels. Luckily I was able to pencil it in just fine over what I'd painted.

The middle panel is com ing out a little weird. It's supposed to be the guys down below taking the pieces of honeycomb from Kodo and putting it in their cart. But I put a lot of blue on the cave wall that looks like a waterfall. I'm going to have to lift some of that off with water and dapping it with a rag.

I will be posting at least once a week.

Check back soon.