Page 5 painting coming along

My page 5 painting is coming along. I like the first three panels. The middle panel is not quite finished. Some of the darks are not quite dark enough in places. And I'll probably go over the 3rd panel again with some darks as well. The last few panels should go fairly quickly. I'll probably finish it by Wednesday night, unless something comes up.

I ended up returning that Brother all-in-one machine I'd bought. The scan quality just wasn't good enough. It made my clean washes turn out all chunky. I guess I'm back to taking photos until/unless I can find a quality scanner for a decent price.

Page 5 pencils complete

As you can see I did end up going back in and redrawing the cave beast on the middle panel. I just liked the layout too much to change the size of the hole in the cliff. I also ended up changing her pose. The original pose was too faked. I'd not used any reference for the first pose. For the new one I got down in front of my mirror and figured out a good pose. I like it much better.

I like the way Kodo's face turned out in the bottom left panel. It really looks like my kid. I left a lot of white on the right side of the bottom right panel where I'm going to put a plume of smoke. And you'll notice I put a baby beast in the last panel cradled by her mother, just to show that the creatures are regular animals and not crazy monsters.

Time to start painting.

Also, you'll notice that the page was scanned in instead of photographed. I bought myself a Brother all-in-one that can scan and print up to 11x17. No more taking photographs. Yay! I hope this machine is up to snuff. The scanning and basic printing are good, but I'm going to have to buy some photo paper this weekend and test out how well it can print photo quality images.

Page 5 pencils started

I've started page 5 pencils. It's coming along well, but the last panel I've got so far has the cave beast way too small for the size of the opening in the cliff. I'll either have to redraw the cliff or the cave around it. I'm not sure yet which one I'm going to do.

I don't want the beast to get too large in the panel or she will be too close to the size she was at the bottom of page 4. She's in almost the exact same pose too. We're just looking down more from Kodo's eyeline as he climbs up the cliff. I think I'll redraw the cliff opening around her, and pull her arms in a bit. The framing in the panel won't be quite as nice as it is now, though. I like that the opening goes off the right side of the panel. I'll just have to figure out another way to make the opening not seem too perfectly framed. Perhaps a waft of smoke going up the right side of the panel will break it up a bit.

I had played around with a few different angles on the top right panel, finally settling in to looking down on the characters below. I'd already looked at them from eye level a couple of times at medium distances, and had only looked down in an extreme close-up and wide shot, and I wanted this panel to be a medium shot with a couple of characters in it.

I'm going to go to sleep now and get up early tomorrow to work on it some more.

Good night.

-Will-

Sick

Been sick as a zombie for the past week and a half.
blech!