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.