Ah! Yellow! A warm page! So, here are two more of our little crew, Patrick and Danya. Here is an instructive moment: this page has a few problems. See all those little cabbages? I hated drawing them, couldn't wait to be done with it. I scribbled them out and I'm sorry to say that they look like I did just that. The details...the details are what make the piece. Look at a page drawn by that French master, Moebius/Jean Giraud...exquisite! Go to his site (if you can read French). Each line drawn is just as important as the last and that's truly one of the biggest lessons I learned when making this graphic novel.
Yeah, that's not a typo up there in the first panel. That's my attempt at a Russian accent for Danya. It's difficult to get inflection and cadence of speech into a silent medium but I've seen it done well before, notably the character of Kremlin in Vaughn and Harris's great comic series Ex Machina.
Something that did NOT work out for me at all when making this graphic novel was working solely in pencil. By that, I mean that my plan from the start was to draw everything in pencil and then scan it into the computer where I could boost the contrast of the lines to darken them and make them look like ink. An unforeseen consequence of this is that I tended to bare down really hard with the pencil to make sure I was making a dark enough line. This not only resulted in massive hand cramps but also made the line work very stilted and stiff. So, the takeaway was that I learned that it's just easier to use a pen to get a dark line (go figure). Now I'm gratefully addicted to crowquills and bottles of ink.
One thing I am very pleased with on this page though was how the little hexagonal sun lamps turned out at the top.
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