New Sidebar Feature!

Hey guys, I did a little renovating.  I removed the Popular Posts sidebar feature (it was the same marker reviews over and over again for the past year) and finally added a Recommended Reading feature.  Right now, it's mostly educational and focused mainly on comic craft, although one, Kakukaku Shikajika is an autobiographical comic about mangaka Akiko Higurashima's (the artist of Kuragehime) journey into manga creation.  I'll continue to add books as I remember them, find them in my collection, or read them, so please feel free to recommend favorites!  At some point, I'd like to do a Great Comics You Haven't Heard of (Yet) series of mini comic reviews and recommendations, possibly next year when I clear out my convention schedule.

7" Kara Chapter 5 Progress Shots

It's been awhile since I've shared comic process, but since I'm working on Chapter 5, I thought I'd share the thumbnails, the roughs, and even the revisions.  Right now, I'm currently working on the tight pencils, which I'll watercolor on top of.

Chapter five is my longest chapter so far, at 25 pages, and I work in batches- all the thumbnails, all the roughs, all the revisions, all the pencils, all the painting, all the lettering and corrections.   Although it's the most time consuming, painting is my favorite part, and the part I'm most likely to share progress on.  Since that's the case, I thought I'd change things up a bit and share the meat and potatoes of this comic.

Thumbnails:

These scanned thumbs were physically noted by myself and Joseph, and I have digital notes from my friends Alex, Heidi, and Chris.  This has become, for the most part, my core group for critique, and I try to get their feedback at each step, including the Chapter Synopsis (just a brief outline of what happens in the chapter, my starting point) and the script.

Uncorrected Roughs:

As with the thumbnails, these have some written corrections on them, but haven't been fixed yet.  

Corrected Roughs:

This is the first time I did all my corrections digitally.  Usually when redrawing entire panels, I'll draw it on another piece of paper and Photoshop that in.  It's a lot easier to make corrections digitally, so I ended up fixing panels I wouldn't've otherwise have bothered to fix.  Generally, if fixes are minor, I'll just adjust it while pencilling the bluelines for the watercolor, but working this way will allow for a tighter finished product.

I used a similar palette for corrections (an aqua blue and a blueish grey as graphite) so I could be sure that everything printed properly, which means some corrections may be hard to spot at a glance.