Work’s progressing steadily, now that my family life’s calmed down again. Last week I finished the batch of nine pages that I started the week of July 1. Nine pages in six weeks is still pretty good, but if you subtract the two weeks when I was barely at home and got no work done whatsoever, it becomes nine pages in four weeks, which is some kind of new record.
Last weekend and early this week I banged out the thumbnails for the next 12 pages. This is really good progress, as thumbnails can sometimes take me longer than pencilling, especially in a big choreographed scene like this one. I have to get angles and placement and backgrounds and interaction to all work together, and make sure that everything’s still in accurate position to everything else in each panel. It’s harder than it sounds, trust me. Half the time I lay out these little diagrams — I’ve seen artists who make tiny sculpey mockups of a scene to get everything just so, and others who actually go on location and shoot photos of each angle to get them right. Me, I’m just pulling it out of my ear, and hoping it doesn’t suck.
For the two nights previous, I also banged out a pencilled page. That’s a good pace; a pencilled page per night, and probably 2-3 inked pages a night. I have one or two pages that I’d like to go back and insert, to flesh out a scene, and I think I’ll do those two with this batch, for a total of fourteen. Hm. I wonder if I can do fourteen pages between now and the end of October? I have two weddings and two workshops in between; if I do, it’ll be a serious achievement.