Lirielle

Some fan art of Kaylee from Serenity. Photoshop CS4.
I lost count of the hours trying to get the likeness right. Maybe 8? Finally had to give up. It’s just not quite there. I wish I were a better artist so I could see how to fix it more easily.

Finished it off with a quick hack coloring job of only an hour or so.

I was a bit rusty after not painting for at least a month it feels like. It was hard to get back into the groove.

My project at work is over, so hopefully some breathing room. Still working on my feature script. But I’m getting the itch to draw again. Maybe will pick up the webcomic again, but treat it more like an encyclopedia of the world for a little bit. Just have some fun with characters, locations, world building without worrying about narrative again just yet.

Getting in some painting practice after being inspired by the season 2 finale of Dr. Who. I’m considering adding a character to Lirielle’s story that will owe his heritage to the Tenth Doctor.

Currently I am also working on a feature script with the intent to get it up on reels by this time next year.

Unfortunately this means Lirielle is becoming a backburner project. I do find that I enjoy dabbling with Lirielle’s story whenever I get stuck on the feature scriptwriting.

Things are going slowly right now. Been very busy with other things that don’t leave enough mental energy to write. Plus I keep getting sidetracked. Like today I upgraded my ComicPress version, but then I spent a couple of hours repairing stylesheets and whatnot.

I’m not sure I’m happy with the emphasis I placed on magic in the last couple of installments. I might try to limit what magic can do soon so it’s not such a can of worms.

I’ve been writing one page at a time and living from installment to installment. I think I need to spend a little bit planning things out a little bit better, which means my already slow one-page-a-month pace is about to get slower. I’m going to try to make it up by posting some more concept art while I get my story in better shape.

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.