Thanks to our commenters for the input on the book cover. It’s a pretty important thing to get right, considering that it will be representing the entire book and its artwork, and in some cases probably the comic as a whole. I redrew and shaded the creature spine and pasted/cloned it in, then tweaked it till it looked right – ie, where I could find a good compromise between composition and character model accuracy. You can see the updated version of the pencil-shaded component here. Now I basically need to re-paint that area of the image and re-color the new linework to match the rest of the painting. We’re still working on fixing up the books, but we’ll be back into posting comic pages now.
Kip is NOT having a good day. I did wonder, earlier, whether Tu Naul learn to ride? ‘Cos palace lemurs probably don’t. And… it would be typical Kip not to mention it (or listen of course),
The new pencil sketch looks GREAT, both the spine position and, well, I do prefer the texture you get with pencil. Which is a compliment on how good your pencil work is not a criticism of your colour work.
I think she expected it to be a lot simpler than it is…
Thanks. Technically it’s the same sketch, mostly (here’s the version with colors added in, again: http://www.tamurancomic.com/comics/2013-01-25-Book-1-Cover-Art-4e755f2b.jpg). I’m working on trying to find a balance with layers where the colored version looks more like the plain pencils, with more of the pencil texture visible… because yeah, I was much happier with how the pencil shading turned out than the colors.
May I suggest you try playing with tinting the pencil shading? It might let you bring the texture out without making things muddy or dark, and also would let you tone down the background blue (I can see why you’ve done it that way, but as-is it’s far more saturated than the characters and is overpowering them a bit) without loosing the overall colour balance.
That’s what I was going to try to do.. I’m probably going to have to go back in with the pencils and re-shade the entire thing to get the right balance of values, and try again.
I’m pretty much a huge failure at anything involving color, so thanks for the help.
It’s the same sketch, but now the spine isn’t behind the elk, the whole picture has more depth to my eye, because the furry one is in FRONT and the elk and Nashua are BEHIND and it just looks SO much better!
Apparently Kip does not understand the concept of ‘Catch up’… Or the fact that now is the time for running for your life. Interesting that Ranon seems to be adapting to the situation better than her. I suppose eighty-odd years of comfortable living would tend to make someone ill-equipped to deal with rapid change.