“Lunatic” Process: 1/11-1/17/17

I’ve fallen off the “post every day” wagon this week, so here’s the work I did for this story over several days:

Continuing to work on the moon images for this sequence, as the clouds move over it, and the face is revealed.  I had penciled the final image (page 7, if the current layout holds), but I went back to work out the previous two (mostly so that I could have the cloud shapes consistent).  These are all done with black, white and gray acrylic paint, and conte crayon for the clouds.  A first try at page 5:

I decided to reject this, because I wanted more clouds in the frame.  Next try:

This (above) is after touch-ups in Photoshop, to darken the black and flatten out the texture of the black acrylic, as well as the warps in the page, which showed up clearly in the scan (as you can see in the top image).

Here’s the next in the sequence, page 6:

I decided that the eye and smile were too pronounced here (spoiling the impact of the “reveal” on the next page.  So I went back in with white acrylic and obscured them a bit:

With these done, I went back to ink the final image of the sequence:

Over the next few days (the holiday weekend), I only managed a couple scribbled sketches.  Since I decided to draw the baby reaching for the moon (literally), after the face appears, I had a new idea for a final page of the sequence, baby’s point-of-view with her hand in the foreground.  Here is scribble of it, with some scribbled thumbnails next to it as a bonus:

I’m thinking that image might work better without the architecture between hand and moon, just black.

Then, unable to sleep one night, I did a few more sketches, some in preparation for finishing up this baby/moon scene, others in anticipation of the next scene to come.  This is all quick and dirty, but I’m being a stickler for completism — and also, these little scribbly sketches are an important part of the process.  So: