Lirielle

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.