I’ve been writing longer stories lately. It’s my goal for this year. The upside is learning a new skill. The down side is they take me longer to produce. So in the interest of also keeping with my goal from last year, which was a one page comic each month, I’m taking a break to revisit the crows.

They’re always up to something!

Comic work in progress, page one of two. Brush, some sponge, and a bit of black Lumocolor pencil I’m going to regret applying before a proper clean up.

I’m very happy with how this is turning out. Between the ink experiments, and the larger paper size, scanning could be a challenge. I guess we’ll see!

I’ve been trying some different paper recently, and was reminded that one of the goals of this comic was to experiment. It’s a flexible goal. What does experiment mean? Mostly it was to place curiosity over visual consistency. To not be anchored by past choices.

I’ve been soft on that goal since I started, and this past year with moving the comic to traditional media, I mostly just wanted to make more comics. I wanted to get comfortable with ink and paper, so I stuck to what little I already knew. Although I did experiment a bit with water-colour, before ditching colour entirely, speech bubble shape, panel layout (but not aggressively, not impressively), and even character design.

The recent paper thing has made me interested in creating textures and shapes with tools other than a brush. I suppose it’s an extension of illustrating in black and white. It’s certainly an extension of feeling that it all looks so ordinary. So uniform.

I gotta go make a mess now. Ta.

Working on this comic is making me reconsider my paper size. I need to start spreading these things out over two 11×14 pages, or move up to 14×17, or even more ludicrous, two 14×17 pages.

I’m not sure what my hangup is, but I’ll have to decide before I start the next comic because my current situation is too cramped.