For a page in “The Oriental Lieutenant”. Without me providing anything so trivial as “context”, which of the four images above do you prefer?

I’m aware that, as an author, I’m not traditionally allowed to do this sort of thing. But this is the Internet! The twenty-first century’s Wild West! Anything goes!

EDIT: Durr, comments are disabled. Sorry. Hit me up on my Livejournal or on Twitter!

100% zoom of a tiny chunk of the line-art pages I’ve been scanning in at 600DPI.

You’d think the Bristol Smooth paper would show less tooth than the Vellum, but only by a small degree (this is vellum, by the way).

This is what the scanned pages look like before I Photoshop them into high-contrast submission.

This little image reminds me of the girls in high school that would just doodle pretty eyes in the margins of their workbooks. They always had long, long lashes and little glinty reflections. Much more ornate than this.

Speaking of high-school and margin-drawings, my Grade 11 math teacher would get mad at me for doodling in the margins of my notebook. His disapproval messed me up. Now I write equations in the margins of my drawings.

Progress continues on Delilah Dirk and the Full Length Graphic Novel. I am well-ensconced in the line-art process, where I’m making some dark, clean lines on top of the squiggly blue ones. You can sort of see the the process in action above, as I’ve plucked out the strands of meaning in dark lines while the chaos of the blue roughs swirl underneath. It’s been a preeetty slow process so far, and I’m getting about 2-3 pages done per day. Usually two. Thirteen pages were completed last week, and I’ve got a lot of pages to get through, so as you can imagine, this is probably going to take a while.

Working on paper means I don’t have to turn the computer on each morning, though, which is nice. It also means I’ll update the blog less. In fact, I will post so infrequently that older posts will probably start disappearing. It’s negative posting. ZOOP.

Look at this, and let me tell you what it is. As I do, you should realize that it’s pretty awesome. LiveJournal user “manintheboat” has taken a smart-aleck line from Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople and made a real-life thing out of it. It is “Blood of My Enemies Tea”, and it is pictured above (along with the wishbones of My Enemies’ Turkeys). For the full (long) list of ingredients (which, sadly, includes no actual blood of My Enemies), take a look at manintheboat’s LiveJournal post. You can also see a photo of her crazy alchemical tea-making laboratory.

If you haven’t read the comic, at one point Delilah Dirk is imprisoned. Selim brings her some tea, as a gesture of kindness, but she responds:

Thinking about this warms the cockles of my cold, mechanical robot heart.

No matter how much I work in colour, I can’t seem to get really comfortable. I thought for this one, I might try a limited-palette, solid-colour approach, similar to this image (read the whole article on the artist here, at Leif Peng’s wonderful Today’s Inspiration site). I couldn’t get it to work, though, since I hadn’t started the drawing with that colouring style in mind. As a result, I didn’t design the image with enough big, solid, shapes or with the big contrasty hits of black. On images like this, I have usually failed to think in terms of colour, focusing instead on the shapes, the linework, and describing the things that I am trying to make an image of. That carries over to the colouring so that instead of really visualizing the image as a colour composition, I end up basically colouring within the lines, like a fancy colouring book. It becomes a technical exercise, where the new challenge is giving everything a colour and value that will approximately balance the composition now that it’s in colour and not just black and white lines. I would like to be thinking, “how can I use colour in this image to create the composition” rather than, “well, her boots are brown cause her boots are supposed to be brown, so how do I either mute their colour or compensate elsewhere so they don’t stick out”. I need to be using the colour purposefully and confidently, rather than as an “add-on” or a technicality. So I’m going to have to start thinking ahead.

That said, I enjoy the way images like this turn out, but the process is still too fiddly and technical-feeling.

Blah blah blah. Here’s some images and notes on the process…