I’ve gone back and added a few pages to the final chapter of Lunatic,… a chance to do more spattering!
Pencils:
Inks:
The globe-y thing in the middle is supposed to be casting light, so I want to shade the character’s clothing and face using ink-spatter. I mask off the areas that will NOT be shaded, using lots of little pieces of blue tape (and a piece of paper to block off the rest of the page):
Then pull out the old toothbrush-dipped-in-black ink and flick it at the paper a bunch of times:
For the last pages of this, the last chapter, I’m doing toothbrush ink spatter effects, for an alien/spacecraft that shows up (spoiler, sorry). Here are some process shots:
First the basic black ink on bristol. drawing, as the alien pulls the character toward the spacecraft:
Next I cut masks or stencils out of paper, and taped them over the page in the configuration I desired, to get the spatter effect around the alien & craft:
Then I dipped a toothbrush in white Kuratake ink, and (wearing surgical gloves), flick the ink over the paper:
Peel away the paper, and it looks like this:
(OH I didn’t document the process of getting that black spatter around the opening in the space-globe-thing, but it was about the same).
Getting very fussy now: I want to get that white “glow” around those objects, but I also don’t want the edge of the spatter to be too sharp, so I replace the paper mask, but peel back the tape for a slightly larger spatter area…
And repeat, another light dusting of spatter:
See…?
One last thing though. I wasn’t happy with the figure of the character, so I decided to redraw, first brushing black ink over:
Then re-draw it in white ink:
All done! Here’s a proper scan:
For this chapter, since I’m changing media or style in each chapter, I decided to try black, white and gray acrylic paint. After trying some different kinds of paper I settled on Borden & Riley vellum film as the best support.
Here are some process steps for Chapter 8, page 4
First, a rough sketch with watery, black acrylic. The borders are marked off with blue tape, so I don’t have to have a pencil line in the image.
One great feature of working in acrylics is the ability to paint over and make changes. I decided the figure of the woman was too tall in the sketch, making the doorway seem not as large as I wanted. So as I added detail gradually to the overall picture, I was able to paint over the figure in white, and re-draw at a better scale:
Gradually building up tone and texture:
The final image. Lots of little adjustments to tone and texture, and thanks to the flexibility of acrylics I was able to mess around a lot with the positioning of the front figure carrying the piece of sheet metal, until i was happy with it:
And page 5. She gets to work. I wanted to convey strength, like the WPA murals of Diego Rivera, Thomas Hart Benton, etc.
Page 6. The first thumbnail (in acrylics), and a more detailed sketch in pencil and pen (with a revised composition):
Page 6, final. Starting with a loose sketch and adding layers of paint, pushing and pulling the contrasts until I think it’s right:
With my one-page, transitional chapter 6 out of the way, I can move on to the next sequence. I want to get away from the cinematic, storyboard approach that I’ve been getting more and more into, pulled by the inexorable attraction of the filmic model. In other words, get as much information into a single image as possible.
At the Boston Comics Roundtable meeting on Jan 10, I doodled these sketches. Looks like a single comics page, but ideas for two pages of Chapter 7:
Here is the finished spread, based more or less on those sketches:
I have been away from the project since the summer (it’s now January), for one or another reason. Getting back to something after a while always presents its challenges.
Luckily, I left off at the end of a chapter, so I can start somewhat fresh, and in this case “Chapter 6” is a transition… actually a single-page, single-image chapter, so not a bad way to ease back into the process (and to drawing in general).
Basically, it’s a graduation “photo,” to mark the end of her “youth” and into the next phase of the story. I looked at some circa 1900 graduation pictures for reference:
Some sketches:
After the last chapter ballooned to 34 pages, I decided to compress my story-telling for a while. The next section is transitional, showing the character’s college career, as she knuckles down and studies hard. I knew that it would be showing her studying long and hard in the library, and I decided it to do it in only 3 images, a progression taking place over a few hours.  I chose to draw the same scene 3 times, from the same vantage point, a bird’s eye view of the library, with the character far below, close to the center of the image.  The changing positions of the characters, and the changing light, tells the story. I have some ideas how I will add tones/shading, sticking to my principle of changing techniques or materials in each chapter.
Some pencil sketches:
I want the drawing to be precise, the line clean. An ink test:
(A diary of the making of this chapter, which begins with the first day’s work at the bottom, and moves up)
March 13: summing up the last 6 months of work.
Yes, six months later, and I am still working on chapter 4. The slow pace partly because of interruptions and creative blocks, but also because this chapter turns out to be the longest so far, and I run into certain problems. And I’m still not finished with it!
So I’ll bring this up to date, starting with page 2, which I completed in late September. Pencils:
Inks (still just inkwashes, the line work remains pencil):
Page 3. I went through several versions of this, over the last couple weeks of October (MICE season. A pencil version that I abandoned. I don’t really remember what I didnt like about this. The placement of the figure, maybe?  
More pencils:
And the ink washes added to that version:
Again, five months later and I’m not sure why I wasn’t satisfied with this. But, apparently, I wasn’t. The shape of the skirt is a little blobby, maybe that was it. Anyway, here’s the final version. Maybe I’ll end up using the previous one, I don’t know. I got options!
Onto page 4, which was pretty simple, just one try (11/2/17):
September 20: Page one, at last!
After the slow process of the last few chapters, I’ve resolved to be more spontaneous, and allow myself fewer “re-do’s.” Here’s the first page, drawn in one try, without any additional rough versions. I changed the composition from the rough I’d done for the mockup, from this: 
To this, the pencils for the final page:
Before diving straight into the washes, I did a little digital experiment with tones, just to see how it might look, leaving the ground white and darkening the gate in the FG almost to black:
Good enough, so I did the same thing with washes. I made some other changes first. I added the professorial figure with the cane, on the right, to reinforce the academic setting. Then, digitally, I adjusted the lettering on the gate a little, because it felt out of perspective to me (by the way, that’s Latin for “knowledge is power.”) Final page:
Looking at it now, I think I might digitally darken the washes, and erase the pavement lines, to leave the ground a solid white shape with darker figures against it — more like the digital-tone version above. That’s more of the graphic look I’d like for this.
(This is a diary of the process of creating chapter 3, updated bottom-to-top. Â So, if you want to follow the whole thing beginning to end, start at the bottom and scroll up)
July 10-13: page 7
For once, this page worked out on the first try. Here are the finished inks, as the kiss commences:
July 5-6 (and peeking ahead to July 23): page 6
This is relatively straightforward compared to what came before, because it’s a “closer-up” view of the couple, meaning less background (phew!). Â The boy leans in for a kiss, puckering up.
My last rough in the mock-up was extremely close, but I decided to move back to a medium view, so as not to lose the body language. Â Started with a couple of sketches/roughs:
Then launch into a final version…
Not happy with this so I abandoned it. Â It felt to me a little like the direction of his “lunge” was wrong, like he was going to miss her. Â Also I had him too close, and I didn’t like the way his nose overlapped with her hair. Â So try again:
I decided also to not make the background shading a uniform gradation (referencing the lamplight from above-right, and getting darker as it moves to the lower right corner), but left light between their faces, so as not to mess up their contours, and let the “light” between them work emotionally.
This post will contain all the material that I produce while working on the 2nd chapter of my comic Lunatic: from thumbnails and sketches to finished pages. Lunatic is a wordless story, with one image-per-page.  I’ll add new material to the top of the post as I do it.
April 19-May 5: Crawling to the Finish Line
Other nuisances of life interfered, and it took me ages to do the last page I had to do. Â Not actually the last page of the story, but a transition page, to indicate that it’s morning in the last sequence. Â It’s a repeat of an image I’ve drawn twice now, of the exterior of the girl’s house, roof, chimneys etc. Â I’m getting kind of bored of drawing it, so I want to come up with something fun to do with this “morning” version. Â A different angle, to begin with. Â First, a light pencil sketch, just for composition:
Then, 10 DAYS LATER (!) (Really, I had other things to do. Â Or was it the boringness of the page that kept me from getting to it)…. a couple more sketches:Â 
Thinking of ways to make it interesting, I think of using masking fluid to define the clouds, with a light wash for the sky, shading the clouds to show the dramatic light of the sunrise. Â A bunch of wash studies:
Letting the ink wash pool up at the bottom (on the tilted drawing table) accidentally makes that “burst” effect happen when it dries. Â I decide to try and make use of that for the sunrise itself.
On to the final version. Â The masking fluid is gooey stuff and hard to apply with precision. Â I don’t really want to muck up a brush with it, so I used a pencil eraser to draw the cloud shapes with it:
Brush on the washes, sloppily so that it pools up just above the roofline.
Et voila!
Once this is all dry, I peel off the masking fluid, so that there is a white edge to the clouds, with the darker shading in the middle.
Washes added to the building:
Ilm not sure if the wash effect feels like a sunrise… or is the building on fire?  But I’ll go with it for now.  It doesn’t have the dramatic lighting that I want, though… so I add more gray wash to the front of the building, and some cast shadows on the roof:
Good morning, right?
