I’ve fallen off the “post every day” wagon this week, so here’s the work I did for this story over several days:

Continuing to work on the moon images for this sequence, as the clouds move over it, and the face is revealed.  I had penciled the final image (page 7, if the current layout holds), but I went back to work out the previous two (mostly so that I could have the cloud shapes consistent).  These are all done with black, white and gray acrylic paint, and conte crayon for the clouds.  A first try at page 5:

I decided to reject this, because I wanted more clouds in the frame.  Next try:

This (above) is after touch-ups in Photoshop, to darken the black and flatten out the texture of the black acrylic, as well as the warps in the page, which showed up clearly in the scan (as you can see in the top image).

Here’s the next in the sequence, page 6:

I decided that the eye and smile were too pronounced here (spoiling the impact of the “reveal” on the next page.  So I went back in with white acrylic and obscured them a bit:

With these done, I went back to ink the final image of the sequence:

Over the next few days (the holiday weekend), I only managed a couple scribbled sketches.  Since I decided to draw the baby reaching for the moon (literally), after the face appears, I had a new idea for a final page of the sequence, baby’s point-of-view with her hand in the foreground.  Here is scribble of it, with some scribbled thumbnails next to it as a bonus:

I’m thinking that image might work better without the architecture between hand and moon, just black.

Then, unable to sleep one night, I did a few more sketches, some in preparation for finishing up this baby/moon scene, others in anticipation of the next scene to come.  This is all quick and dirty, but I’m being a stickler for completism — and also, these little scribbly sketches are an important part of the process.  So:

Completed the new version of page 4, with a more dramatic angle to the roof, and a bigger moon for more “presence” (the page, and the story, are about the moon, not the building, after all).   I used acrylic paint for the building and the moon, conte crayon for the clouds, and India ink for the sky.  Here it is, the raw scan above, and with photoshop touchups below:

In Photoshop I darkened the black of the sky, then added more contrast in the roof, and lightened up the craters in the moon a bit.  It ended up looking like this:

Here, by the way (below), is the earlier version of the page, for compare and contrast. An improvement, I’m pretty sure (though I kind of like the big cloud in the older version better than in the new.  Oh well.)

A moon-and-clouds sketch as a warm-up, then I began inking/coloring the new version of page 4:

MICE stuff, SPX preparations and other things I had to do pretty much completely ate up all my work time this week.  Somewhere in there I managed to sit down and do a couple of sketches of clouds and moon, which will be useful when I get back to work, hopefully, after SPX.  These were drawn with charcoal pencil and black, white and gray acrylics.  Not much of a week’s work, but I like the way these turned out so that makes me feel optimistic.

Started a final version of the first page….conte crayon and ink. 

I woorked on the moon transition, from cloud-covered, to the face emerging.  This is done with black, white and gray acrylics. Though my plan has been this comic will be one image per page,  I’m thinking it’s too much to stretch this over several pages, so I will do a panel page for the transition.

Not sure of the composition yet….  maybe a more conventional grid.  Also, I had to flip the second panel because the direction of the cloud movement was wrong:

I am finding that thumbnailing is inadequate for this project.  In order to sense if I am telling the story with the right rhythm, I feel like I need to see how the page turns will really work.

I do a rough thumbnail of the page spreads….

Then I print up the pages with the right layout… trim and tape them together to create a little mock-up of the first “chapter” of the story:

Better to work this out in advance than after I have drawn “final” pages… some of the sight-line angles of the shot-reverse shot-type pages between the baby and the moon/roofline would be affected if I have to move things around (and I want to avoid the same direction diagonals on facing pages).

Reading the mock-up, I make some adjustments, thumbnailing a new set of spreads”

Next, I’ll start roughing out these changed pages and see how it works….