I don’t know why I decided to do weekly summaries, but here is the third.

Page 15 gave me bad artist’s block. I wrote the entry without a problem, but I must have sketched at least fifteen different scenes and poses before finally just deciding on one of them. I have found, unexpectedly, that picking a single picture to represent a piece of a story is much more of a challenge than coming up with a half dozen or so panels for a regular comic page. Most images give me a bit of trouble in that respect. The story segment for the day decides what options I have for the image, but I tend to put off writing the final version of the story until after I’ve finished the image. As a kind of reward.

Stop by next week to see what necromancers do at night, hear Mim impart snippets of wisdom, and experience Cold Bill’s rapidly developing conflict resolution skills. Be back Monday!

I’ve tried to describe how the different layers of paper cutout things are fit together in order to make a final image, but it’s a bit difficult to put into words. As a result, I’ve made a little .gif animation of the image for Page 10 that shows it going from sketch to final piece: Page 10 Assembly

In the animation I’ve simply started with all of the paper layers turned off and slowly turned each color block layer on one by one. That’s usually what it looks like after I’ve done making all the layers individually and turn off the drawing to see how it’s going to look in the end. You can see how certain pieces are odd shapes that are covered up by other layers to make recognizable shapes. It takes a lot of planning, but I think the end results are worthwhile.

There won’t be a post for Friday due to traveling. Will be back Monday!

Sorry for not making something new Monday or Tuesday! I’ve spent the last couple of nights working on a new drawing and didn’t have time on top of that to make a new Cold Bill. A new page will be posted Wednesday, and from that point on I am going to switch to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule in order to have time to do things like ink illustrations and some mixed media things I’ve been planning. The problem is that drawing regularly for Cold Bill motivated me to want to do other art, but there isn’t really enough time after getting home from work to do it all. Daily story projects are probably more for people that can manage to do it for a living, not people squeezing it into the end of a long day.

SO: MWF Cold Bill starting Wednesday!

Today starts the Monday-Wednesday-Friday format. The posts should be the same as before, just two less a week. I hope it doesn’t make story progress seem to slow to a crawl. If so…maybe check Mondays for three pages at a time?

I mentioned when Mim first showed up that her design took a lot of time to finalize. I’m satisfied with the results, but some of the details of her garb take a long time to render in cut paper. For instance, today’s Mim has about 26 individual layers(though it took about 30 total, with some merged into others for the final). I liked how the animation of page 10 turned out, so I made an animation showing all of the layers of Mim coming together: Page 20 Mim Assembly.

Maybe I will make one for each of the main characters.