Re: VanderHuge Studios

All of the character reference sheets are finished. The important ones anyway. There are eleven important people in the book and I've got an alright idea of what they look like. But I want to be sure I can draw them all without any doubt. I started a drawing of all of them that I'm going to completely finish. I'll get a little insight into how the book might look when it's finished. There's a problem though, with having that many people on something like that. I call it a shoulder montage. There's almost no way to design that many unrelated characters together, so you just get a bunch of floating heads. So, this drawing with everyone isn't supposed to really look good, but it should prove to me that I can draw them all to satisfactory specifications. A week or so ago, I drew a family portrait to be sure that I had the kid and the parents down. I thought it turned out pretty well, the only problem was that it was too cute. I felt like the book would be

Forgot about Drawing Table Tuesday for a while. I have time to start doing this again. This one's blurry because I used my crappy camera and not Staci's fancy one. Let's see if I can hit every Tuesday from here on out. Drawing Table Tuesday = a picture of whatever's on the desk when I remember it's Tuesday

Not much to show yet.

Yesterday I officially started working on this . Sort of. I guess I started pre-production. I'm not sure how long the character designs will take. A few have been cobbled together for a while, so those were easy. And there aren't many people in it- or at least, people that I'll have to draw more than once. Maybe about 9 or so of these left. And a couple main places that I'll have to draw over and over. And then I want to start thumbnailing. I'm thinking that'll take the better part of a month, because I want to thumbnail all or, at least, almost all of it. I kept the scripting pretty strict, well, in the sense that by the time I was writing it, I was pretty aware of what I could or couldn't fit comfortably on a page. I'm feeling very slow to start. Very bogged down. This beginning stuff seems to take forever. I can't wait to actually start on this. Right now, page 1 feels like it'll be a milestone.

I had this idea for the cover pretty early- the old price tag. And in the rush to finish it, I forgot about it. I added it at the last second, but it didn't really work. It was too distracting and it broke the aesthetic. So I took it back off. But I still like the idea, even if it didn't work. I can't do anything else with it, so here it is.

Now, where to start... You wouldn't think 45 pages would be that thick. Calamity Cash and the Town with No Name is finished. Completely finished. I don't want to think about how long I've been working on it. To put it in perspective, when I started, I was single and living with my parents. Having finished it, I'm married and living in my own house. As a final recap- I asked Randall if he had something ( a story ) he'd like to have drawn. I wanted to practice on something, but wanted to be removed from the story part. Sort of see if I could get into something that I wasn't really invested in, and, if what I was doing was bad, and because it was their story, there was someone other than myself to tell me that it was. I remember being pretty adamant about it being for practice and not to expect too much ( hindsight= thank God ). I think the initial page count was 46. Randall wrote a script ( anything he wanted, from what I remember telling him ), and I

I needed something for decoration. Desperate, I made this. Looks decent enough on the cover.

Meant to put this here Saturday. Almost finished. Layout is taking a little longer than I would have liked.