Reviewing the first 61 pages of my children's picture book

Initial style, Jan 2021

Current style, one year later — Jan 2022

I started writing book 3 on January 25, 2021. It’s not January 23, 2022 and I’m two-thirds finished. My thought, back in 2021, was that I could finish the book in three months. At the time I didn’t have a work contract and I believed I was capable of producing one page every two days so long as I didn’t have the distraction of a full-time job. As it turned out, I was called back to work part-time. With a small workload I was able to finish two pages a week. I had this schedule for two months, and then my workload doubled, and my art output was limited to about one page every two weeks.

Time passed. Without realizing it, my drawing style changed imperceptibly over the last year. Today I reviews the 60 pages I’ve completed, and I see chaos. My book doesn’t is cognitively confusing because it doesn’t have a consistent style. At this point I don’t have the time or energy to redraw my latest images so that they conform to the original style I planned to use. So, I’m just going to plug away and finish the book.

When will the book be finished? This year I’ll be working full time again, and that means I’ll be lucky to complete one page a week. I have about 15 more pages to complete, and I may have to add more pages. I’m looking at finishing the book in four months … if all goes well. If I my time is consumed by work, I’ll fall back to one inch a day.

Heavy Mucha-inspired outline

At the moment I like heavy outlines for book three rather than the more “painterly” pages I’ve created. I altered the outlines for page 52 and I’m happy with it. I think that the heavy outline technique will help make the page’s more consistent. Making this change means I’ll have to go through all of the pages and decide which need to be modified. It’s more work, but I think having a consistent style will make the book more readable..

Pages 40 and 41 with Consistent Gas Masks

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Here’s Tuca’s new gas mask. It took all afternoon to get this look — I decided that the mask should have realistic geometric shapes rather than rustic hand drawn lines. I had to learn how to use Clip Studio Paint’s vector drawing tools. I made that decision after I tried to draw all of those ellipses and they were all wonky. Tuca’s mask on page 41 needs some work with the front breathing ports. Tomorrow is another day.

Page 35 and Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work

I was inspired by Wally Wood’s White-Ben-Day/Dark-foreground

Having lots of dialog means drawing characters talking. Making sure that they’re interesting visually is a challenge. I was inspired by Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work for my page 35 image. When I finish this page, Betty will be looking seriously darkened, and hopefully the picture will be interesting. Every time I draw Betty Burro, I remind myself never to create a character with long ears! They’re complicated.

Page 2, Version 1 -- A Moai Outrunning A Ball of Fire

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I’ve moved on to page two of my third children’s picture book. Here’s a new character, Tupa Moai. He’s just a kid, and, as you can see, he’s alive and running from a nasty ball of fire. Usually people think of moai as being giant statues carved of volcanic rock, but in this story, moai are very much alive. Unfortunately, most of them are have been turned to statues by a vicious volcano spirit.

I started this picture in Krita, but switched to Clip Studio Paint when I ran into some of Krita’s deficiencies. I’m talking about Krita’s selection tools. I suppose there’s a warp tool in Krita somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. Rather than waste time looking for it, I went back to my ever faithful Clip Studio Paint EX.

On The Road Again -- Going into Production Mode for My Third Book

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Rough background for first page

This picture is a rough draft of the background for the first page of my latest book. Jimmy Jay and Betty Burro, the heroes of this story, will be walking along the path. We’ll be looking down on them as the see the circus tent in the distance for the first time. I’ll be using Krita for the painting and coloring this book. I love, love the oil paint brushes.

I want to minimize talking heads in this book. The characters need to talk, but reading dialog can quickly get boring. I’ll use as many of Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work as I can. In this first picture, I’m going to use a birds-eye view of the characters and let the distant view of the circus tent catch the reader’s eye while the kids are talking.

Food for thought

• Wally Wood’s 22 panels that always work

• Try using Krita for digital painting.

Al Fresco Art Club, Jan 10, 2021: Learn from a Comics Idol named Wally Wood

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22 Panels That Always Work, or some interesting ways to get some variety into these boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page

Today’s art club challenge was to learn from a master. My choice of master was Wally Wood, one of the early Mad Magazine artists. The legend is that he compiled a tip sheet for his pencilers so that they would work more efficiently. I made my versions of the first six infallible panels.

Wally was paid by the page; the faster he worked, the more money made. He motto was:

Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.

Resources

• Woodwork, IDW Publishing (English and Spanish)

• Wally Wood, 22 Panels that Always Work, Internet Archive

Rearranging My Blog's Furniture

Today I spent my time reorganizing this blog. Instead of two sidebars, there’s only one now. At the top of the right navigation panel I have an image of Jimmy Jay that’s linked to my books page. Unfortunately that image is really too low energy. It needs more sizzle. I’ll give it another go tomorrow. I also cleaned up (removed) some of the links in my blog roll.

My inspiration for this end-of-year housecleaning is Kana Urbanowicz’s elegant blog. Check it out!

Next on My List: Remembering What I Know About Adobe InDesign

Looking at all of the speech and text bubbles is painful. They chaotic placement really annoys me. For my next series, I’m laying out the text bubbles first and drawing the pictures around them. I want to be like Hal Foster, the artist who wrote and drew the Prince Valiant comic strip for 45 years or so. His goal was to preserve his beautiful images by keeping all of the text at the bottom or top of the page. There’s not a single speech bubble in the many thousands of pages he created. Here’s an example of a drawing the would only be diminished by a grotesque speech bubble coming out of the Prince’s mouth.

This is an awesome picture. It blows my mind that Hal Foster could do a full page of comics every Sunday for 45 years and keep the quality at this level.

Chore Day, Sep 22, 2020: Laundry and Cover Page Revisited, Yet Again

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I usually don’t work on my books on chore day, but this weekend I’m working on the cover page. My deadline for publication is the 30th and I’m pressed for time. This has been a hard page for me. I’ve spent almost two weeks on the title page image and this front/back cover page. I’m slow because I don’t know what I’m doing — I’m learning as I go, which is okay, but there are weeks when I take a detour to learn a basic skill. This is one of those weeks, and the basic skill is creating a composition that represents the central idea of the book.

Once I complete the cover image I have to write the back cover blurb.