The big news from this week was a positive response from a literary agent (!)  I’ve been sending out agent queries for this book, and one said she was interested in reading it and seeing more – that’s no guarantee anything will come of it, but it is a much needed positive reaction and a big motivation to keep up the energy levels with regard to this project.  And energy levels these days are a precious commodity.

So, as a result of her interest in seeing more of the book, I switched gears and started making finished pages.  I’m a little more than halfway done rough blocking, so I chose to work on a couple of page spreads that I feel confident about.  This opened up a huge pile of experiment time – what exactly do I want the size of the book to be? How exactly do I want to work? What exactly do I want the feel of the images to be?  Ugg, I have a headache just recounting this decision making maelstrom.  But, I figured out the finished size and cut come paper!  In the picture above I’m working 1:1 – I’m painting it as exactly the size I want the finished product to be.  I had trouble during the painting of Story(cycle) understanding what the finished page would look like as I painted it slightly larger, so I wanted to try doing things 1:1; however, I’m doing little panels now, so that means tiny painting.  I’m going to finish this spread as is, then try doing things 2:1 for the next spread.

The plan is to just paint away and let it get kind of messy, then Dave is going to clean up the gutters digitally, making one side’s white and the other side’s black.  He’ll also put in text boxes and dialog digitally, which means all I have to worry about is painting, yay!(It’s enough to worry about…believe me…)

Polish pages shall be posted!