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.

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!

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.