Page 11 - With an adorable dog, even.

Hello all you lovely people! I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Ours was spent quite well, in the relative warmth of Florida, and it was a nice trip. Too much food, of course. 

This week in the studio, we're trying to get a lot of work finished before the craziness of holiday travel is upon us, and I think we'll be able to do that.

This should be a familiar page as well. The bottom panel is the first panel that we completed, I believe. It was such a struggle to get our style down, and to be cohesive, but it's been much easier since then, now that we know what we're doing. Heh. The top panel was much easier to create, since we took the tree form from the bottom and have a pretty good morgue of foliage going. We had to create that frickin' adorable beagle, though. Norman Rockwell would be proud.

Page 10 - Halfway and then some!

Wow! I was so looking forward to reporting our halfway mark, and now it's a spot in our rearview mirror. We're pretty far ahead, so hopefully we can stop working long enough to catch the blog up to where we are.

You might remember the top panel from this post, but here is the completed page. I love seeing the two panels side by side. It's a pretty darn good-looking page, if I say so myself. I love the close-up of the princess, especially with that dramatic far-away scene.

I don't have so much to say right now. It's been a lot of working over here, and my brain is a little fried. Last week was spent in Pasadena, with the Hartford Art School, and I got some great inspiration, especially with a visit to the Disney Archives. Original Eyvind Earle and Mary Blair pieces, right in front of me! So amazing. How could you not want to come back and work, honestly?

My dear counterpart just finished the quarter for the holiday break, so we're having some quality dual working time lately, and I'm taking advantage of it while I can! We'll be updating soon, though, so stay on the lookout!

Page 9 – A New Chapter

This page begins the story behind Ridley's scars. We wanted the book design to reflect both comics and children's books with these chapter breaks: the Knee, the Elbow, the Hand, the Forearm and the Forehead. A block of narrative text will connect the spot illustration to the panels underneath.

We started with the knee because EVERYONE we know has a scar on the knee. It's the price of growing up. The staging of the actors on this page is important, because we intentionally place grandfather and granddaughter apart from each other. They are cordial, but not overly affectionate. As we progress in the chapters, they will interact more.

Art-wise, I personally like their head shots–they both show a lot of personality. Maddie is cute as a button and when Ridley smiles it's like the sun peaking out of the clouds...

Page 8 - Beginning of a story

This is really the page we were working on in North Carolina...it just seemed more appropriate to talk about on the last page, given the subject matter!

I love how Ridley's face goes through the same processing as Maddie's did when she hurt her knee. And when he realizes he can turn around his hurt feelings into a special moment with his granddaughter. Again, a fairly simple page to do, but the characters are beginning to connect with one another, so we like it!

Looking at it, it seems like the ground might be a little too sparse in the middle panel. Maybe we need to add some flowers or a few more bunches of grass there. Other than that, I like it. And we get to start on the two-tier storytelling pages after page 9, which will be SO MUCH FUN. I can't wait to start drawing forests again!

Also, you can see that we've started watermarking our images. When I have more time, I'll go back and watermark the ones that are already up. The issue of watermarking has been nagging me lately and it was brought to our attention last weekend that we really should be doing it. It's the trouble with posting work online – I'm not so afraid that someone would steal it (low-res and a poor file format for printing anyway) but we'd like people to know where it came from if it shows up somewhere else. So, we're gonna try this out.

So close to halfway I can almost taste it!