Added 2 new A* pages:^ Two pages today. : ) Working in all pencil is loads faster than trying to ink over pencils, so I think I'll be able to get two pages done most days, unless I have something else to do as well, like hanging the art show yesterday--well, and Fridays, Friday's will probably just be one page, like they were back when I used to do multiple pages regularly, which was...eh...episode 12, it looks like, a little over two years ago. (Edit: Oh except I did a spurt of them around the end of episode 16 - middle of episode 17, didn't I? Hah.)
Some regular readers have written me--which I really appreciate!!--about this latest art style, and it's clear that some are skeptical about it, which is perfectly understandable, given that I am too. However, one thing it really has going for it that maybe you can't really see directly is that it's a huge relief to be able to sit down every day to draw and just be able to draw whatever my pencil wants; I didn't really realize it before I'd done this for a few pages, but now I know that the spectre of having to ink a drawing in was really affecting how and what I sketched out in pencil--somehow it caused me to tighten up and drawn conservatively, so I never really got to the loose and slightly abstract style I wanted to reach; somehow in pencil, large eraser at the ready, my brain is able to relax and let my hand do what it wants.
Not that every page goes smoothly--page 12 here took at least four full re-draws, and hopefully that's just due to the head-down perspective I always try and always struggle with, rather than drawing fatigue in trying to do two pages in one day--but at least I don't constantly feel like I've really failed to reach the type or degree of drawing I wanted somehow. I've still got a lot to figure out about various things I can do with the pencil, but I feel like there are way more possibilities open to me than there were before, with ink; like, that hatched-over face in page 10--it's dark, but there's still a face behind it--wouldn't have worked at all with my inking, but in pencil it's so simple to do, and subtle value relationships are very intuitive and flexible.
That probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Anyway, hopefully there will be lots of days in this style where I'm able to get more than one page posted. I'll update my Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and tumblr as each new page comes out, so you can follow me on one of those if you want to catch the pages as they occur--or you can just keep reloading the front page of this site, that's fine too. : D
I think this pace will also help the pacing of the story; with one page a day I always feel compelled to try to condense things a lot, probably often too much, like parts of the complicated sequence at the end of last episode, which ended up being even more confusing than it should have been; with two pages most days I have the space to let things breathe a bit more.
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