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!

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

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 had trouble in the past properly rendering backgrounds. I have been trying new things out with each image that I create, and sometimes things just don’t work out right and get cut from the final image. Backgrounds get cut a lot, typically filed in a “try it out later” bin. For the background on Page 14 I’ve tried blending the original hand drawn background with the paper layer.

My process for each image starts with a few rough sketches of how I want to lay out the frame, followed by a final drawing in a 4″ x 4″ square. I draw everything that’s going to be in a scene, then scan it into Photoshop and cut out the shapes that become the color layers. Simplifying characters hasn’t been too difficult, as I tend to know what the color shapes are going to be. Simplifying backgrounds is something entirely different, and I’m still slowly learning how to best translate a detailed drawn background into a series of colored shapes.

Page 14 is something in the middle. I still use the colored paper texture, but the pencil lines remain intact and give it a bit more spice. I’m not sure if this is something that I’m going to stick with, but I’ll try it out for a while to see if they’re successful images.

I apologize for how generic Page 13 ended up looking. One part was the background just refusing to work with me, and another was time. I spent most of yesterday and today poring through illustration books and character designs from different games and fantasy series trying to get the right inspiration for Mim’s outfit. Simple-but-unique is tricky, especially since this cut paper style doesn’t lend itself to fine details.

Speaking of Mim: Cold Bill finally got his name! It took a while to finally get to that part of the story, but there it is. Time to update the Cast section!