Artist Notes 10/07/2020: Hey guys, happy Tuesday–for once! >.>;

Well, late Tuesday night anyway… Sorry I’ve had so many pages going up on Wednesday lately, stuff has just been crazy. -.- I’m going to get back on top of it though! I hope you all are doing well!

Anyway… A sarcophagus full of bones!? Who ever would have expected that? Not Guy apparently. XD When I started working on this page 90% of my focus was on the two panels showing Guy’s expressions, and I kind of surprised myself how much more time/care/thought went into the other two. XD I mean, it’s no secret that my favorite panels to draw are closeups on faces, so character expressions are where I focus a lot of my attention in terms of storytelling, but for this page in particular I was taking a pretty utilitarian mindset when I initially started the panel of the sarcophagus opening and of the bones but after putting just a little work into them I was pleasantly surprised with how much I was enjoying them. In fact I feel like the bones panel wound up as the star of the page. XD

Although, in regards to the top panel, I have to say one of the bigger challenges of doing these pages black and white first is that for background I tend to lean pretty hard on paint, so to suddenly need to rely on inking more I feel like they in particular end up looking unfinished… and to be fair, they are unfinished. But it still bothers me a little bit. Suffice to say I am really looking forward to sitting down and having a nice long painting session and knocking out all of the black and white pages. I’ve told you guys it is something I work on periodically but I’m jumping around a lot more than I used to when I’d do color pages every week. I’m thinking in the next couple months I might start taking a day off here and there just to paint. I’m not flying home for the holidays (thanks coronavirus…) so I have the PTO to spare… >.>; But on average, when I’d color every week, a single page maybe took me 2 hours to paint, so if I had a day to sit down I could (in theory) knock out a ton… furthermore doing them in batches is way more efficient. In fact, when I was toward the end of volume one and I was way ahead in pages (imagine!) I’d go through, for example, and color Betha’s hair on 5 pages at once, then her dress, her skin, etc, and something as simple as not needing to switch colors so often saved a shocking amount of time. XD

Not that anybody asked! I’m sorry, again, I’m genuinely excited to do some painting so I’m rambling.

In any event, I’ve got to call it a night now. I hope you all have a great week! Stay safe and wear a mask! <3