Working on today's page now (bit of an unusual schedule today for me, such is life)--wonder if I'll get it done before midnight? :P

Oh, I can't remember if I did! I don't think I did. It was page 106!



I was pretty out of it last Sunday. =P

Page 107

Kinda happy with this one so far. But if you want a good chuckle, take a gander at the preliminary stage:



I don't really know how these things come out at all. =o

Should be back to getting them out a bit earlier in the day Sunday next week!

The Princess just reached 25 Facebook fans, so I can give her Facebook page a custom URL! It's http://www.facebook.com/princessgiant (the old, long URL is http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Princ ... 2991980193 ).

Page 108

Wasn't absolutely sure at first how I wanted to bring in the archer (one of Uncle's lead henchmen; we've seen him a number of times before); when I was first messing around with what would end up as the final layout, I couldn't quite figure out how to fit him in



so I did a quick experiment with another angle



which had some things going for it, but really having the Princess climbing up over the ledge wasn't workable, since she was still supposed to have a guy clinging to one ankle dragging her down, and anyway I think this is too similar to the angle I want to use for the next page--and I don't like to repeat angles. :P

Notice also that I always seem to draw my lead female characters with oversized heads on the first pass--always leads to big trouble later in the drawing. Guh! :P

Page 109

Well I'm only just now commenting on this because I've been kind of frazzled since the big holiday weekend. =o Some female readers on the Princess' Facebook page assumed the cloaked figure is a girl, hehe. And my dad thought the guy falling away in the foreground had a big "M" on his chest like a super-hero--it's actually supposed to be his helmet. So apparently this page is particularly hard to read! :o He did notice the giant hand in the background though, so that made me happy.

We've been danglin' princesses for a while now--but maybe that's finally coming to an end! Whew. :P

Page 111



I'd drawn a couple bad layouts trying figure this one out, and when I got this far on what was probably the third one I thought oh man, this isn't gonna work, better start over again:



But then I was looking at the final-res preview I'd generated of it, and I thought there was some possibility to the thing, maybe if I just redrew the face, and drew the shoulders apart a bit; so I doodled that on the preview version



and I knew I was onto something. In fact I even decided to keep some of that for the final version, which is why a few lines (can you find 'em all??) are a bit blurrier than usual, since they were upsampled to bring them back into the high-res working version. And I actually might like this more abstract version more than the final, but a few things just weren't quite right enough for the situation, like the Princess' suddenly demure downcast gaze, and that heavy shadow on the outer part of her left leg.

Page 112

Close-up of this week's dynamic duo:

Page 113

'Cause we all missed the ol' pikeman. :D Actually I kind of like him as a character--this scene might not end up showing him in the best light, though... Speaking of light, I hadn't planned to do that big fissure up the middle there, but it seemed to help tie things together--and it gave a reason to have some nice backlighting on the archer's cloak.