Mmmm… foreshadowing. Foreshadowing, backstory, and bullets. And part of a boob near Jason’s left shin if you zoom way in on the full-size file.

THIS PAGE HAS EVERYTHING!

Four pages left of the chapter and one page left of this scene – 5.17 is rendered and ready to draw and I plan to start work on it this afternoon. I’d prefer to go into production with a clear head and feeling decent, but right now that’s not in the cards. I slept badly (I always sleep badly when the thermostat is pegged) and I feel like a couple of chunks of ground glass are rattling around in my abdomen. Fortunately those chunks haven’t made their way to my hands, so I’m physically capable of drawing – even if I’m not on my A game.

August isn’t even out of the Pay Rent period yet and it’s looking crazy – two ongoing contracts, a good-sized chunk of unfinished client work that could get the go-ahead at any time, some sort of job interview next week, and an unfinished pro-bono project that needs to go live already. Plus who knows what else.

I do know “what else” for this weekend – 5.17 pencils, inks, and cleanup. Maybe even shading!

2012 07 17, 07:08 – Man, this page needs a rewrite. Panel one, at least – the rest is fine.

07:58 – Revised into something I’m very happy with, but still need to fit to the page. No more dancing around!

2012 07 18, 01:42 – Finished revisions, at least for now. A total rewrite, and an extra panel to boot!

2012 07 18, 06:20 – Rendering is under way. I have a crapload of chores to tend to here in a little bit so I don’t expect 5.16 to render during this work period. My (tentative, always tentative) plan for the week is to progress rendering through to the end of 5.17 at least. I’d make some more noise about drawing things, but as usual it looks like I’ll get to that when I have a more favorable opening in my schedule. I can multitask renders fairly easily – it’s one of the reasons I went to 3d backgrounds in the first place, really. A bit of setup, hit GO, then do something else while it grinds away. Put the render sandwich together, drop it into the page file, set up the next one, hit GO, return to doing something else. I get a bit more OCD about drawing – I tried running inks and cleanup in parallel with rendering a few times and I wound up with clean line art and an idle PC.

This is how I’m on 5.16 with 5.11-5.15 ready to draw but as yet unpencilled – I’ve been juggling work on a couple of websites over the past week or so, and it clicked that I ought to be progressing ATC in parallel. My current client to-do list should be crunched down to something more manageable by Friday, at which point I should – hopefully! – have the time to start pencilling.

2012 07 19, 04:12 – Rendered and ready for line art.

2012 07 30, 14:46 – Pencilled and inked yesterday. The art generated for this page looks like it’ll require less cleanup than the art generated for the previous page – though I’m doing both in parallel and consequently don’t expect to be shading this one for a few days at least.

2012 07 31, 13:58 – Cleanup complete, will be assembled shortly.

16:04 – Line art scaled into place, dialogue tailed, added bullet trails to panel three. Page is ready for shading.

2012 08 04, 00:47 – Panels 1-4 shaded.

01:56 – Primary shading complete, I think. Ignored the reference render for panel five and winged it for shading – looks decent at the moment, though I think I need to sleep on it before committing. And I should probably do that soon, rather than around my usual time.

12:59 – Spitshined, though not entirely out of the woods – the page is basically done, but every time I zoom in I find something to tweak.

14:09 – Page is GO!.

Mastering notes, 2016.12.05 – Tweaked dialogue in panel one.