These are background characters. Now I have to create the foreground characters, Jimmy Jay and Betty Burro, as well as the juvenile crocodiles.
My 40-year old Rollei 35 arrived today. It’s a jewel!
I’m calling this page finished. It’s time to say “enough fiddling” and move on to another page. I have ten weeks to complete 8 more pages, put all of the images and text into InDesign ,and upload the final PDF to IngramSpark. Ten weeks sounds like plenty of time, but it’s a tight deadline.
More characters, more colors, more composition. I’ll finish this on Monday, This has been one of the most challenging pages — so many characters, a complex background, and the difficult composition! But fun to do, all the same.
Characters from the first pages of the book will be in the audience: giraffes, elephants, crocodiles, and even a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Did I mention that the tightrope walker is a burro?
This is another version of Jimmy and Betty saying goodbye on the beach. In the background the Ferris wheel and circus tents are supposed to be brightly lit, but I can see that they need some help. Note to self: they seem to be the right size when they’re enlarged on a 27-inch screen, but when they’re reduced to A5, they’re too small. The moral is: check your artwork at the publication size.
The sand needs something — perhaps a sea shell or two. Jimmy and Betty need some shadows, too.
Two-page spread, Mexican circus tents in the background
Today I drew this rough sketch showing Dylan Dolphin leaving the story. The background took the most time. I’ve redrawn those tents half a dozen times. To make sure the tents didn’t distract the reader, I de-saturated the background colors, removed the black line work, and gave everything a dose of Gaussian blur.
Since this is a two-page spread, I’ll have to deal with Betty’s arm passing through the spine page margins. That will create a 3/8in gap in her arm as it goes from the right page to the left.
I used a reference to draw this picture of a fabulous Mexican circus. Clip Studio Paint EX helped me draw the yellow and red bands quickly with the Lasso Fill tool.
The more I use Clip Studio Paint, the more I appreciate the tools designed for drawing comics. Even after drawing three books with CSP, I’m aware of only 10% of CSP’s features. I enjoy fiddling with other painting programs, but when I have a deadline, I reach for CSP.
My plan is to turn these make these pictures work together. The beach scene will all of the residents of Easter Island, the reanimated Moai the the little volcano demon, waving farewell to Dylan Dolphin, Betty Burro, and Jimmy Jay. Since these are two unique scenes, I’m going to extend the ocean (in the beach scene) to behind the jumping dolphin. I’ll have to correct some colors and lighting. I can sense that I’m going to complete this book in the next couple of months.
It’s a bittersweet feeling. I’m happy that I’m coming to the end, and I’m sad that it will be over. I’ve been working on this book for 17 months, far longer that dreamed it would take. There are so many ways it could have been better, if I had only had the skills to make it so. So it goes.
Today I looked at page 65, didn’t like the composition, and moved the characters around. I’m going to try to make it clear that Betty Burro is behind Jimmy Jay and Dylan Dolphin. Now both Jimmy and Dylan are pointing towards Betty.
I’ve been stuck on this cat for days. Just when my contract job has eased up, other tasks fill the calendar, and I end up with just a few minutes to work on page 61. Today I extracted the tabby cat from the rest of the scene so I can put her on a later of her own. Page 61 is getting cluttered and it helps me focus if I can blank out the rest of the scene.
