“lunatic” process: July 6 2016

Real-time blogging on the process of my new project, still at very early stages.  The plan is one image per page.  I want to take each image seriously so it can hold its own, not being part of a sequential page layout.  Which means in some cases that I will have to do as much reference and sketching for a single image as… well a lot.

Such is the case with my first image.  It’s an “establishing shot” of a Victorian or Edwardian street scene, residential.  I gathered plenty of photo reference, thanks to Google (“Victorian Street” mostly):

A rough sketch, with some other doodles to do with the story (full disclosure, I think I actually drew this yesterday):

Then another, 

Right now, I’m not sure yet what the dimensions or even the shape of this book will be.  I was thinking square, and I drew this at 6″ by 6″.   It seemed a little small, hence the bigger square around it to try and get a feel for the right size.  7.25″ square?  Or maybe it should be horizontal rectangle?

I didn’t even know how to start thinking about that, so I decided to just draw some studies based on the photo reference, for the hell of it.

I’d been picturing less of a working-class street than this, but it was a good photo to work from.  Maybe I’ll go a little more downscale after all.

Anyway, not much progress today, but at least I drew something.  Besides dimensions of the pages, I don’t know what media I’ll use either.  On that last sketch I drew in ink, then shaded/textured with conte crayon.