Well. Today just kinda evaporated. Seems like a few minutes ago I checked mail and had my happy for the week – my copy of Boumeries Volume 1, air mailed from Montreal. Signed! Then I blinked – or rather, settled down to work – and holy shit it’s twelve hours later.
Eleven and change, really. Twelve if you round up.
Typically I prep a page from the script and layouts on up – background renders and positioning and setup and whatnot in one or two sessions, then line art as its own distinct “event” – I may be rendering panels for the next page or a page further down the line while I’m inking and shading, but the entire purpose and process of the work session is line art through finished page, with the page having been brought to the point where it’s ready for line art previously. That wasn’t the case with this one, which is how the time evaporated. I entered the work session with the background for panels one and two done and the initial setup for the first panel completed. Oh, and the splattery bits in the gutters – that’s been done for awhile. Reference renders while the sun was still up, whipped out the WACOM for the panel three background, figured out which “drones” I was drawing and which would be silhouettes, then pencilled and inked somewhere between seven and nine (I think, I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the clock), then a lesser Forever of photoshop.
Oh, and I revised the layout a bit. The workbook thumbnail had been bugging me for awhile – so I used some walk time early in the week to sort it. I also spent a chunk of last night reviewing the script for the rest of the chapter and writing parts of chapter five. That’s coming along surprisingly well, though I still need to make the time to get the bits of Four sorted and prepped into the script document. I’m creating layouts on the fly while I’m working on Five – they seem pretty solid, so that should hopefully cut down the between-chapters downtime.
It doesn’t do anything for the current production slog, unfortunately. I’m currently thinking a page a week might be achievable for the remainder of the scene – that’s doable for the next two pages but a bit of a stretch for the rest due to as-yet unmet CG requirements and contractual (read: “day” job) concerns.
I mentioned previously that 4.10 and 4.11 are a spread that shifts the gutters from white to black by way of splattering and gray. I also mentioned in that post how that connects forward to The Dualist, so there’s no need to repeat myself here. Nifty, isn’t it? I think it is. I also think it was rather a lot of work and look forward to spending less time on gutters and framing for the rest of the book. I’ll be doing some atypical-for-me things with layouts over the course of the next several pages, but probably not anything along these lines. Should look pretty kick-ass in hardcopy!
