Finally wrapped up the value pass of Ruby June confronting Coo-Thoo-Loo.  This one took a while to finish as I was filming every step of the way and the camera disk would fill up every 20 to 30 minutes.  I would have been able to post the movie today save for the fact that I left my second laptop at home today and that is the one I create my lovely movies on.  Bummer.  Oh well, I’ll have something awesome to post tomorrow!  In any case, this one was causing me issues with the masses of deep ones behind and around the octopus king.  I wasn’t happy with the way they were coming out and ended up deciding they were too well lit.  I needed to push them into the background and just hint at them which meant re-rendering them after I was almost done.  Worked out better in the end, though.

Still plugging away on this one.  The whole process of filming work on this panel is taking some time.  I’m using a camera with video features and every 20 minutes or so the disk gets full so I have to download all the movies to my computer, free up space on the disk, and then restart the process.  additionally, after 4 or 5 hours of filming, the battery is near dead so I have to re-charge it.  Still, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to finish it in another 1 or 2 days.  It will be fun to see the whole of the value process compressed into a 4 or 5 minute span.  Here is the latest progress on the panel where Coo-Thoo-Loo is having a discussion with Ruby June.

Two more charcoals to go and it looks like I’m going to have to work on them both at the same time.  This one I started today and I decided it was high time I documented my process a bit more so I’m filming my work on this from start to finish for the value layer.  Because I’m filming at work, I will probably start on the last painting values in between when I am filming this one.  So this is where I left it off today.  Got everything blocked in and am starting to push in some detail already.

I worked and slaved over this value pass, trying my best to combat a horrible job of gessoing and I think I finally got it to where it was workable.  I might touch up some of the finer areas still before gelling it but I’m pretty pleased with it as a base layer.  As a precaution, I re-gessoed my two remaining canvases this weekend, working them over with drywall sand paper and then re-applying gesso again. This time I smoothed out all the lumps with my finger and ran the brush over the areas again.  Hopefully it will do the trick.

So here is Ruby June, after giving Coo-Thoo-Loo a little attitude, being hauled off to underwater prison. What a troublesome little girl to underwater evil-doers bent on world domination!

This panel, I can already tell, is going to be a bear.  It is going to have multiple light sources and a lot of characters.  On top of that, when I was gessoing the canvas, my gesso started clumping and I neglected to smooth it out enough, thinking I could sand it after the fact, which I did.  Unfortunately, the sanding took the gesso too far down and now I’m getting these uneven charcoal spots (as you can probably see)  I should be able to fix the issue, it will just take a bit more time and a little more care than usual.  Still, I like some of what is happening here already.

In this panel, the octopus king, Coo-Thoo-Loo, has directed his deep ones to lock up our heroine!  Shame on him, the big meanie!

Finished the charcoal value pass of the page showing the deep ones after Coo-Thoo-Loo’s spell has been broken.  The end is getting nearer!  I have three more charcoals to complete before I can look at them together and evaluate if any alterations need to be made.  Always good to take a final look to make sure proportions stay consistent, values comparable, and to make sure there are no glaring consistency errors.  When a work of this size spans as long as this has (about 3 years now, though the fault of a very busy freelance art business and life in general) one needs to make sure major elements have not shifted.  There was a definite progression in the look of the character here so I ended up having to alter 4 panels.  Anywho, we’re getting closer to the actual painting stage!  Exciting!

Here is a working scan of one of the last panels in the book where Ruby June has blown the Voice of the Sea and broken the spell the nefarious Coo-Thoo-Loo had over the deep ones.  See, they weren’t such bad guys after all!  Here I am working from my thumbnail reference, having gridded out the canvas, toned it, and started applying my lighting.  We’ll see how it progresses.  It took me a little while to get to this so far as our house is battling a virus and our 3 month old has been requiring a lot of attention.  That coupled with freelance and my day job teaching has eaten up a little time.  Insert wrench A here into plan B.

This was the last of the original canvases that needed to be re-addressed.  I pushed the value range to be much broader here in line with the rest of the canvases.  Now all I have are 4 more new canvases to complete and then I can begin the arduous task of painting all of them.  I plan to tackle all that at the same time to maintain good color consistency through the series.

This page is the beginning of the book with Ruby June on her way to the beach, not suspecting anything is amiss.  The sign hanging over the planter will read Innsmouth Inn.  For those of you familiar with H P Lovecraft, you hopefully will recognize the name of the town.  It helps to explain why she is one of the only people in town and why there are Deep Ones staring through the windows at her.  Boy is she in for a surprise!