I honestly worked on this strip for 5 nights. I started on Tuesday of last week, and finished up tonight. I really thought I'd have it up last wednesday, but alas, this was a much longer project than I anticipated. First, this was a color one, so I drew it on watercolor paper, which has little bumps and ridges. This made the penciling stage a little harder. Also, I couldn't erase mistakes much because if I did, the paper would become weak and the ink would run when I inked it. So I had to be much more deliberate in the lines I put down. Also, my pencil lines smeared a lot more than the normal paper I used, so that didn't help when I started inking. Tonight and last night I worked on coloring the page. I have to confess that I'm not much of a colorist, so making color choices sort of stresses me out and I spend a lot of my time mixing the colors...probably more than I actually spend putting colors on the page.
On top of all that, Jason and I decided that this should be a double sized image to really tell the story we wanted to tell, and I really could have used about 2 more panels to get the timing down. When I realized I didn't really have enough room on the page for the panels I wanted, I had to figure out how to combine some elements and shift stuff around, so that took some planning. Anyway, this was a lot of work, which is why it wasn't up last week.
Depending on whether Jason and I can nail down the finer points of the next few stories, we may not have a strip next week to allow us time to write scripts for the next few strips. We have some ideas cooking, but need to work out some details, so thanks for understanding. Enjoy!
I have to say, I'm glad I didn't commit myself to getting a strip up last week 'cause I came down with a pretty bad cold last week and couldn't draw anything. I'm better now though.
