designs

Here are a couple of designs I needed to work out. One is of a tertiary character named Benn, based off a friend of my son's. He's going to be the guy helping Kodo climb to the top of the cliff.

The other is Benns' ox. I did the drawing on the left first, and I liked the silhouette of the body and horns. I played around with a more curved horns, but think I'll go with the long horns. I tried out a few different kinds of feet until I came up with a three toed version. The two feet on the left are a camel's and a cow's respectively. The rest are the final three toed feet from different angles.

I did a profile shot of the loaded ox based off refeerence from camels I found on the internet. And a close up of the head. It's basically a long faced, three toed ox with a beard, long ears and horns. I didn't stray too far from an actual ox, but that wasn't really the point. I like just taking things a little out of bounds. I still want this world to be believeable... somewhat.

Page 6 pencils started.

I'm starting page 6. Here's a little bit of my process. On the bottom left you see my layout for the page. On the top you see a panel of Kodo climbing up to the crest of the cliff. On the bottom right I took a photo of my son climbing on his bed for reference. I did a test drawing in my sketchbook on the top right to make sure I figure out any weirdness before drawing it on the page as I can't do too much erasing on the watercolor paper. On the top left is the pencils onthe watercolor paper. I still need to add a background of distant mountains, but this is kind of fun to look at how I approach each panel.



And here's the final page 5 page. It turned out pretty well. I wish I'd put more blue and less brown in the shadow areas of the rock. And I may go back over everything with a wash of cerulean blue to mute the color of the rocks a bit. I'm not quite sure.

Wondercon is coming up in a few weeks. I was hoping to have a preview issue out by then, but it looks like it won't happen that soon. I will try and get some prints done of my Xiola cover for sale, though. The last run I got came out slightly blurry.