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September 7, 2006

Pencil pencil

Twelve completed pencils. Eleven completed inks. Gonna sit on the last page before inking, think about it a while. Two more, maybe three more 'pickup' pages to pencil before this set is done. that means I'm going to go back and flesh out one character's history with another page of exposition, and give another some qualms about an action, the better to round out the character. Fourteen, maybe fifteen total.

Lordy, am I sick of pencilling. Inking's a welcome respite, and I'm looking forward to the autopilot of painting. That means audiobooks, conversations, and something a little less than my full brainwracking attention.

September 1, 2006

Love to paint them mousies...

So I did a Mouse Guard pinup a while ago, with the intention of surprising David with it at Wizard World Chicago. As you may have read, all hell broke loose and, though Paul did a bangup job of computer coloring it so that David could see what I had in mind, I hadn't had a chance to get back to it.

Till now. Click for a bigger image.

The character is Gwendolyn, the as-yet-unseen leader of the Mouse Guard. Hey, I had to draw her as a buttkicker, didn't I? She's fighting -- of course -- a green rat snake. Yes, they really do have blue eyes.

Don't call him Skippy. Only I get to do that.

A couple weeks back, I also finished the pinup of Scipio from Templar Arizona:

Hot. Tay.

Spike's posted him in the Templar gallery with her commentary, here.

Cent

Somewhere in here, a while back, I crossed the line over my one-hundreth page. The hundreth page is not yet painted, but it is inked, which makes it almost halfway there. There are another twelve pages in this sequence, which, when finished, will put me well over the mark. There's a ten-page-or-so scene from midway in there (it fits in around current page 70 or so) that I'm waiting to hear from one of my advisors before I start. There's also about, oh, thiirty or forty pages left in the current plot, I think. So the book may cap out at a nice, respectable 160 pages, plus some gallery stuff and footnoting, so -- maybe about 180 pages total.

*squints*

By golly.

I think that there's a light, at the end of this long dark tunnel.

Hum.

I think once I get this batch done, I'll take another art break and scan and letter them. Then, I might just start releasing the earlier pages as a webcomic. We'll see. It may take longer than that.