Chore Day, Feb 22 -- More Shopping, Cooking, and Sketching Moebius Again

I’ve been copying from The World of Edena by Moebius. This is one of the frames on page 263.

It’s chore day and I did my chores. I shopped at the co-op, cooked meals for the family for the coming week (should last about four days, at least), and did a little sketching. I’ve mentioned that I’m fascinated with Moebius’ clean style and use of color. I’m particularly interested in his imaginative landscapes and how he does so much with so few lines. He’s a model of efficiency and lack of clutter. When he does use hatching, it’s just the right amount at the right time. I find his work amazing.

Buddy Wants to be "family"

I created a new version of the “buddy asks to become part of the Jay family” picture. I’m dropping the original version of the picture completely. I couldn’t make the picture fit the landscape orientation without doing way too much work. It was faster to create and new picture.

Here’s the version I won’t be using.

And here’s the new version. Momma Jay needs some attention. It’s a Work In Progress

Picture #12 digitally colored and Wishful Thinking about Spare Time

I’m getting the hang of coloring these images using Procreate. Now that I have some spare time (2 weeks off my day job), I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to color more than one image a day. I do have some chores to take care of, like fixing the bathroom window and making a trip to the dump. But other than that, it’s full speed ahead on finishing the coloring and getting the text and pictures into inDesign.

I used Procreate and the Frankentoon brushes for this image. I’m using the Frankentoon Crayon color palette for this project. As you can see from the smiling faces, drawing ugly pictures of your friends is really fun.

Re-inking the Entire Project

After roughing out the book in inDesign, I realized that every image needs to be re-inked to generate a sense of consistency from page to page. Redoing every image is going to be a lot of work, but I have to do it. In my rush to meet my schedule, I started cutting corners with the images. The closer to the deadline, the more simplified the images became. Seeing them strung together in inDesign was a wake up call — I don’t want publish my first book knowingly aware that it’s crappy.

I plan to re-ink all of the images with Frankentoon’s free Procreate fine liner brush, and do the coloring with Frankentoon’s crayon brushes. I’ll have my palette of colors ready and I’ll focus on working in a consistent style from page 1 to page 32. I dream big.

I can do one of these images every evening after my square job, and maybe more on the weekends. This means that I’ll move my deadline back by a month.

Here’s today’s work. There’s something screwy with the margins!