2.5.648612875

Finally finished penciling* this. And I can show the whole thing because it's all mostly dialogue and doesn't show anything important. *Penciling being laying it out and drawing with light blue colored pencil.

Now on to the arduous task of drawing/tracing with a real pencil. Which will hopefully have just as much detail, but with more refinement and cleaner line work.

We'll see, I guess.



Here's the background for panel 1.
I started drawing backgrounds and gestures on transparencies then lightboxing them to save the paper's lifespan. I'm using super cheap comic boards and they don't take too kindly to erasing and erasing and erasing. This saves me from making holes and helps reduce clutter from panels so I can draw people and objects without worrying about accidentally erasing important lines of the background, or vice versa.

When I thumbnailed this many moons ago, I didn't want to resort to drawing shapes or outlines for a group people. Mostly because it's usually just to save time/work. But, unfortunately, I had to. The panels were just too distracting with 6 faces in the background. And even then, it could be take care of with different post-drawing effects. Like darkening or lightening the lines so they're not as prevalent, but photoshopping is against my set of rules for the second half of this.
I guess in short, is I probably would've/could've if this were going to be a finished drawing, but because this will forever be in "process limbo", it can't be done well enough, and this was a better option.

A common problem, well, more of an occurrence, is that when pages are drawn and printed, scanned and shrunk, a lot of the little detail is lost in the process. I was fighting this a lot in the beginning of the project- Something would look decent on the real page, then look like crap on screen or in print. Sort of like a "can't see the forest for the trees" kind of problem. And you either get better at it or at least used to it.
And I'm happy I'm not the only one to notice or be a little bothered by it.

Sean Phillips, one of the artists who's work I try to follow, has a an entire book with 400 pages dedicated to nothing but enlarged details of pages he drawn.

Anyway, that's it I guess. Back to work.