Page 3 done. Page 4 undercoat

Finished page 3. I'm having fun playing with the purple smoke. As I mentioned before I tried to get the smoke into panel #5 but it ended up starting to look like light rays so I just went with that on that panel. Light rays works fine for that one. But I am enjoying painting purple swirls in front of the clif walls and behind the character when there's nothing but sky behind him. I hit the wash with a dash of blue to indicate the sky poking through the smoke.

It's fun to paint the dark bees and the darkness of the inside of the cave. I enjoy getting dark colors in watercolor. I never use black. I used to use neutral tint from time to time, but I'm going to do this book without it. I'm getting good darks with different combinations of burnt sienna, sap green and ultramarine blue.

My biggest challenge so far is to remember which concentration of what colors I'm using for the boy's clothes. I've got a color test I did, but as I've been going on I've used a little green here and a little red there that I hadn't used in the color test, so he's changing a little bit like a chameleon from shot to shot. But I'm not too concerned about that. So long as the darks things are dark and the light things are light, I don't think the exact colors need to match from panel to panel. Anyone might appear to be made up of different colors depending on the angle of view and lighting.

I do plan on adding a wash of cerulean blue across the cliff wall to make the stone a bit more cold and help the character to stand out a bit more. The page is pretty orange as it is.

Here's the cerulean blue undercoat for page 4. I've gone in and painted the rope and hinted at the smoke for each panel, and have done a bit of light color work here and there as I got distracted for the undercoat. But soon I'll get on to the full on painting. I can't say what method I prefer most yet. Painting across the entire page and all panels as I've got the colors wet, or working on one panel at a time.

I assume I'll fal into a rhythm at one point, but it ain't happened yet.