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.

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.

Page 3 painting in progress

Page 3 painting is coming along well. Here I am painting a panel with a beehive perched right next to a cave in the cliff wall. I've used cerulean blue as the undercoat shadow of the cave. I prefer it to ultramarine blue as it is light, and I can cover it up if I so choose.

Here I've gone in with burnt sienna and ultramarine blue to get a dark brown, while leaving patches of light which were originally to represent smoke rising (though I ended up making it look more like light shafts in the end). At this stage I'm starting to get the tones I want.

By the end of the panel I've gone over again and popped out the forms of the cave beasts without being to obvious that there are two hairy lumps in the cave. I'd like it to be a little vague as to what they are, but if you can tell, it's not a big deal. I added a touch of cadmium red to their coats to break them up a little from the rocks around them. I painted the bees with a thick coat of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, with cadmium yellow highlights.

I won't be able to finish the page for a few more days as I'm taking my wife away for her birthday this weekend.

I've really got to pick up my pace soon, but I'm still not that comfortable with my approach yet. I need to take the time I'm taking to insure the quality level I'm striving for. How do you balance quality with speed? In the end I want something that I can be proud of, but I'd like to finish the book within the next year. What I've got now is a product I am proud of, and at the moment, quality is more important than efficiency. So, hopefully in time my efficiency will catch up to my quality and this beast of a book will finish itself.

Thanks for keeping up on my project.

Page 4 pencils complete

I finished the pencils for page 4, though I haven't yet started painting page 3.

At the top we watch as Kodo sews a needle through a piece of wax, then lowers it to his companions below. He continues to carve out honeycomb and pass it down. Then, from within the darkness of the opening in the cliff wall, a beast moves into the light, and Kodo jumps back, panicked. It is only a female, therefore not as large as the males, but Kodo has never before been this close to one of the apes, and it looks large enough for him to make a quick retreat.

I am planning on painting the beast mostly in shadow, but I drew the whole thing so I know where to paint the lights and darks. I do want to show the creature well enough that you can tell how it will differ from the beast that Eleya fights in the arena, so I want to give you a pretty good view. You will see it a bit more on the next page as well. I had originally written that the beast in the arena was your first introduction to the creatures, but later thought it'd be good to show the reader a beast in its natural setting. I want you to see that they are just animals living their lives, and that it is the humans who have created this legend around them.

Tomorrow I'll start the painting for page 3.

workspace and watercolor board

I"ve been stretching my watercolor out on art boards, which are not meant to withstand the pressure of watercolor paper. They are too weak and warp once the watercolor paper gets wet. But I wasn't wiling to pay $40 for a watercolor board. It's justa piece of wood with a finish on it. So instead of buying a watercolor board, I made one. Well, two, actually.

I went to OSH and bought a piece of birch plywood which I cut to make two 20x24 boards. I lightly sanded the plywood on all sides, as I don't want splinters when handling the watercolor board. Then I dusted off one of the surfaces and applied a coat of waterbased finish (Minwax Polycrilic Protective Finish) to the dusted surface. After allowing to dry for a few hours I applied a second coat. Let sit for a day and voila! I've got two watercolor boards for a total of $13. I like to have two pages on boards at a time so I can make changes to the previous page based on how the painting on the current page is going. I can't tell you how glad I've been to have kept a page on the board after starting the next one.

I began drawing page 4 while I let page 3 stretch on the board. As you can see from my photo here I've got the pages I've completed on the wall along with some character designs of the characters appearing on page 4. Then I've got my reference photos and my layout version of the comic so I know what the hell I'm going to draw.

Page 3 pencils

Here are the pencils for page 3. On this page Kodo has caught his fall, while his grandfather watches from below. Then Kodo sees the beehive. He moves in closer to examine the hive. The hive sits on the edge of a crack, or cave in the cliff wall. Kodo begins stabbing at the hive and peeling away the protective wax.

The panel on the bottom right and the bottom left are opposite framings, one from below and one from above, yet Kodo is the same size in both panels. I'd rather they weren't the same size. Whenever possible I try to avoid drawing a character the same size in two panels. But I'm happy with the drawings, so I'm going to leave them as is.

I ended up adding a jewel hanging from the old man's forehead that I will have to add into page 2. It was actually part of the man's design, but I'd overlooked it. I haven't cut Page 2 off the board yet, so it should be ok to add it.

I'm going to try and pick up a better surface to tape my paintings to as an art board is not really sturdy enough. I want to try something that's cheaper than the watercolor board you buy for $40 at Blicks. Seems like a ripoff. But I need something that will be sturdy enough, will not stain my paper if it gets wet, and preferably isn't too heavy. Someone at APE said he uses masonite, but that sounds like it'd be really heavy. I'll check out OSH tomorrow and see if there's anything that looks promising.