Every journey begins with a first step. Here are my first steps applying color. I begin with faces traced (from a model book) with black fine tip pen, scanned at 600 dpi, and uploaded to COREL Essentials.
Then I leap into the unknown and fling paint everywhere applying shadows. You should see my living room; there are spattered pixels all over my rug, walls, and shirt. (My first digital joke). These shadows are haphazard, helter-skelter, and savage. But I gotta start somewhere.
My quandary: do I postpone drawing pen/ink finished pages until I gain competence as a colorist? This means coloring all 22 characters before drawing any pages. That will require weeks of coloring before drawing any pages.
Or do I start drawing finished pages (I've got 50 pages scripted, blocked, and ready for images) and learn to color as I go? The problem with that plan is that as my technique improves the finished book will be of uneven quality. The earlier pages will be amateurish while later pages become less amateurish.
I think I'll keep improving my coloring technique. Certainly I can exceed the level of skill on display above. This'll put my schedule off once again...but since I'm really under no deadline I can putter at a leisurely pace.
I do have this fear somebody, somewhere on the planet is working on a comic book based on Ecclesiastes and every day I delay publishing they get closer to beating me to the punch. This was Art Speigelman's challenge when Steven Spielberg was coming out with An American Tale. Art was halfway through MAUS when he got wind of Spielberg's plan to use immigrant mice with nasty cats in 1890's NY city. So he published half of his work (Jewish mice; Nazi cats) before completion. Hey Spielberg, you got any plans to do a film about Ecclesiastes? Please don't.
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