Sigh. I really do mean to publish the next page, honest.

My brother’s indie film premiere’s next month, so all my free time is going to fixing shots and working on the poster. My day job has really picked up too, rolling into production this month.

On top of it all, I got sick. My 18-month-old daughter managed to get pink eye, an ear infection, and a nasty cough. Of course me and my wife caught it too. Spent the last couple days sleeping a lot and taking cold medicine. I seem to be on the mend and will soldier in to work tomorrow.

While home from work these past couple days, I did seriously think about trying to finish page 4. But it’s really hard to work when you’re miserable and practically asleep and really the highlight of the day is managing to microwave your lunch.

After a marathon month of working on page 3, work has kind of ground to a halt. The bulk of my time now focuses on redesigning my brother’s website in preparation for the premiere of his indie feature. And even there, the tech work is dwarfing the creative. Trying to wrangle CSS and javascript so that it works across Firefox, Safari, and IE really hurts.

I’m attending Siggraph this week and yesterday picked up a couple of art books from Ballistic. Digital Painting 2 and Concept Art. Very informative and inspirational.

I did put in a couple hours last night on the beginnings of page 4, and I think have finally cracked the staging problem I’d been wrestling with trying to show how Lirielle drops from one walkway to another.

Right now my brother’s website is taking priority. So the page 4 update is probably 3 or 4 weeks away. That’s a long time between installments! The story is crawling along. I’m tempted to just write prose or screenplay format and post it along with one illustration on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, just to try and get things on a more regular schedule. We’ll see. I’m really enjoying the comic art creation. Maybe I’ll just have to get looser and not spend so much time per panel.

Designing the costume for Lirielle in her street urchin phase. Her pose is stiff and she could look scruffier. But mostly I’m working on the design for her wool coat and skirt combo. I’m still debating whether or not to give her a hat or a cap of some sort. She’s not wearing a hat in the opening page, so I’m going to skip it for now.

This drawing ended up with a half-painted half-line art look. It’s not what I originally intended. I thought I’d try to go all painted or with a more traditional comic book coloring approach. But this is kind of in-between and has an interesting feel to it. We’ll see if my other concept work turns out like this.

The other half of Crabbe’s team is Buster. Imposing and very strong. People expect him to be the dumb muscle of the team, which Buster often uses to his advantage.

A quick study of Crabbe, one of the team of men employed to catch Lirielle. We’ll meet him and his partner in crime on page two of the story.

A major milestone for me. The first page is done! Of course I see plenty of things I’d like to improve, but I think it’s better if I plow forward on the story and get more pages done.

I’m still trying to find the right tone and style for the webcomic. It’s close, but it’s a little time consuming and I’d like to find a style that lets me work quickly but still feels right for the story I’m trying to tell. So this will be an evolving piece. I’m also trying not to plan as much and leave more room for happy accidents and exploration. I tend to want to work out all the details beforehand, but then I never get past the design stage.

The half page art format doesn’t leave room for much per page, and the painted style takes time. I think it’s a nice balance between amount of work and being able to finish something fast enough that I feel it’s within reach. Otherwise it might be too overwhelming.

Maybe some weeks I’ll be able to do longer pages, depending on the complexity of the subject matter.

I’m finding that I need to design a bunch of characters before I can start on the next page. Later on when the world is more fleshed out, I can get right to painting pages. But during this early phase I think it’s going to be a week of writing, a week of designing, and a week of painting. I wish I could post updates to the story more quickly, but there’s quite a lot of work to go before I’ll get to that point.

There’s a saying around work about putting out info about a film: “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” So I’m a little leery of posting my artwork in progress. But since hardly anyone is reading this (I know because I check my site stats) I guess it’s okay. I’d rather keep up with semi-regular updates than worry too much about if what I’m posting will make a good impression or not. I’m exploring artistically anyway, so things are fluid, and I kind of like having a little trail to follow. It’s like a “making of…” book only done in the moment rather than after the fact.

I’ve decided to go with a concept painting style for my pages. I find it easier to to play with shapes and color and imply detail rather than having to design and draw things in a lot of detail. At the speed I’m trying to work, this approach seems to suit me better. Otherwise I get bogged down in the line art.

This page is coming together in about a week, so I think it bodes well for my productivity. The goal is to paint a page one week while writing the page for the next week. Though with my work schedule it’s probably more likely to be a page every week and a half or two weeks. We’ll see.

Anyway, I like the way this page is shaping up, even if my airship is changing proportions a bit from panel to panel. I’m trying to figure out how much to design beforehand and how much to improvise during the page creation. I’m happy with the overall feel and atmosphere and thought I’d share.

There’s an interesting post over at the 37signals blog about the difference between an experienced carpenter and a novice carpenter. Here are two paragraphs that struck a chord with me:

 
The novice by comparison, spends a great deal of his time trying to figure out what to do. He does this essentially because he knows that an action he takes now may cause unretractable problems a little further down the line; and if he is not careful, he will find himself with a joint that requires the shortening of some crucial member – at a stage when it is too late to shorten that member. The fear of these kinds of mistakes forces him to spend hours trying to figure ahead: and it forces him to work as far as possible to exact drawings because they will guarantee that he avoids these kinds of mistakes.

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.

I feel like the novice carpenter. When I’m writing, I’ve been trying to plan out the arc of the story in a lot of detail and feel paralyzed at times because I’m worried about making a mistake and writing myself into a corner. I’ve tried outlining and index cards and stuff like that to try to figure out the broad strokes of my story. But inevitably I get bogged down in details and trying to patch plot holes and impose logic too early. I’m not quite experienced enough to understand how to construct a story with confidence.

I feel like I am improving and getting a better understanding of my particular writing process. I think I’ll be able to get over the hump soon. At some point I feel like I just have to take the plunge and commit to an idea and be confident that I’ll be able to address issues as I go. It doesn’t have to be perfect right from the beginning. For some reason I can be comfortable with that with programming or my drawing. But I find it harder to apply that concept to my writing. And that’s why I’m still a novice.

A quick painting of Prof. Cromwell, or perhaps just plain Cromwell. Inspired by Michael Caine, even though in my painting he ended up looking a little too old and it’s not a very good likeness. I think he ended up looking a bit too much like Malcolm McDowell, and I didn’t want to go quite that intense. But hey, not bad for 90 minutes.

He’s going to be a mentor to Lirielle. He’s going to push her hard. I don’t think she’s going to like him very much at first. Kind of like Eliza Dolittle and Prof. Henry Higgins, who are definite influences on my characters. I watched My Fair Lady a lot while growing up, and oddly enough, in college because both me and a roommate were into it.

In the steampunk-influenced universe that Lirielle lives in, the airship is the primary mode of long distance transportation. Large areodromes are a cross between Victorian rail stations and modern-day airports. The exposed infrastructure is tough to draw, but it something I find to be very visually interesting. I found a picture of the interior of a hangar and did a quick paintover to give the idea of space and depth I’d like to see. I put a couple of ships in there for scale, but I think they turned out too modern looking for where I’d like to eventually end up.

I’m hoping to set a couple of key action sequences in this environment.