The Black Opera Progress Report

With the page layout sketches for One Act #3 now complete and set for clean-ups, I feel good about the pacing of the story and also my productivity. I get to focus on pages for the rest of the month.

Now, there isn't always news to share every month on what I'm doing, especially if you were in today's stream, since you're watching the news happen!

Anyway, these layouts are done, and pages are ready to get some work. This week will see panels for each page as I finish up the final work for The Golden Apple (still not at the printer yet, don't yell at me). The only hold-up there is me enjoying the stress of being late on something again... Anyway, panels will be followed by an actual dialogue script so that when it's time to do letters, that'll ease up on that process (and maybe for the next book I can actually do the script at the start with layouts when I'm supposed to!).

Next week will be cleaning up the page art and prepping the line art. What the page art stage will do is establish the consistent details in the background (think props, lighting and shadows, sizing, that stuff), and character designs (how each character stands, moves, posture, physicality and weight, gestures, that stuff). I don't expect to be in line art that week unless I'm REALLY good with getting these details next week. Line art will be the week after, followed by flats.

For my week in flats, I want to do separations first, to establish spatial planes and overlaps ahead of shadows. That layer will set me up with large shapes to do better lights and shadows on each plane. Then I'll break each of those down for my normal flats process, so every element is able to get its color. After that week, I'll go back to character designs and start picking my color palette. I HAVE to do better than what I did for The Golden Apple and secure colors ahead of time and know what my shadows and lights look like first. So August week 1 will be a full focus on color, light, and shadow. It'll be August week 2 when those color choices will hit the page, starting with shadows.

Week 3 of August should be the final week of production as I put in the dialogue and effects, finalize the book cover design, and prep it for the printer! The only timeline I'm running against is the start of grad school classes during August week 3. They will take up my evenings, limiting my time to work on this, or any other project, to my normal stream days. But by that time, the book should be just about finished IF I STICK TO THIS TIMELINE.

Okay! That's news. I'm off to go get started on these panels going and get some work done on the dialogue. See you next stream!