“Lunatic” 9-5-16

Pretty full day of work today, on the Labor Day holiday monday.   I finished page 2.  In general, happy.  I think I am doing a little better using conte crayons for tone.  The composition works okay, and after some fussing and using acrylic to white-out, I like the expression on the nursemaid’s face.  The whole thing is drawn in conte crayon, and then I used black ink and white acrylic to punch up the figure and carriage so they stand out from the background:

 

 

My one sorrow: I actually measured to try and get the two window-things to be the same size.. yknow, like they would be on an actual building.  But in the frantic heat of drawing, I somehow ended up with the one on the right much narrower.

I guess I could cheat, and squeeze the left side oft he picture in photoshop.  It goes against all my principles, but I’ll do it.  First I use the marquee tool to isolate different parts of the picture as separate layers:

Then, I stretch the right window layer out slightly… and squeeze the left window to be a little smaller, and combine all ingredients:

Barely noticeable, but it makes me happier, and took less than an hour.  And I even had some time to start sketching/planning next moves.  Back to thumbnails.

 

Grappling with some basic questions for the spreads, and at this point I have to nail it down: the baby is looking up at the moon. The moon is looking down at the baby.  Does it work better to have them “facing” each other across the fold?

That seems the more obvious, reinforcing the left-right reading direction.

Or is it better to have them facing opposite directions.. baby on the left page, looking up and to the left / moon on the right-hand page (i think they’re called recto and verso), looking down to the right.

I feel like that could help the reader take in each image on its own, slow down the flow from image to image.

I fiddled with the layout a bit, and made another decision: have the baby reach for the moon, perhaps smiling, in the last page of the chapter.  Well, no, the LAST page would be black.  Which has some meaning: the baby reaches but grasps nothing of course.

Sketches of page 2.  Working out the perspective.  If the baby’s going to reach in the last image, then her arms should be on top of the blanket (at least one arm should, and it has to be the left arm because when she reaches I don’t want it to block her face).