Building an Illustration, Part II

Continuing off the sketches I posted last time, here are the pencils for the actual drawing:

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And a little closer up:

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As you can see I’m keeping the pencils almost as loose as a seagull. An that’s hard for me. For years, I worked for hours creating spandex tight pencils before whipping out the ink.  My main focus is on the composition and the lighting. And those are two things I’ve always slacked on in the past.

And if I’m being perfectly honest, if the novel sells, I’ll probably re-do the sample illustrations. Just like in writing, re-drawing what you think is a ready to go layout usually brings about better results.

One last pic. Here’s the beginning of the inking process. I’ll have more details and pics on that in the next post:

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Also, in the coming posts, I’ll write a bit more about the tools I’m using on this project.