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holiday coloring
I did a little coloring whilst in Amurrica. I might’ve done more, except the next few pages I can do with crayons and I didn’t have any. (More accurately, I only had access to 24, which is totally not enough. Also I screwed up and didn’t put a color-catcher page between two of the pages so I need to see if I can erase the colored pencil shadows that got pressed through onto what’s supposed to be my next page to color.)
(Other people don’t worry about things like this, do they? Oh well.)
Indy: How come you didn’t color the lady?
Me: I did. She’s just really really pale.
Indy: *looks so dubious*
There are like…four versions of the swooping off with Leetah scene in this coloring book. I mean, okay, one is Leetah saving Dewshine from the zwoot & her and Cutter being all sexytimes above it, so it’s not exactly the same, but it’s damn close, and then there’s this one and there’s another one with Cutter snatching Leetah & breaking Rayek’s spear and then there’s a THIRD that’s a simplified version of the scene/emotional content that was done for a potential, not-using-the-book-art coloring book that never happened, and honestly, one of those would have been enough. It’s a like 32 page coloring book, it really didn’t need four versions of that scene. Or two. Especially when I can think of dozens and dozens of frames I’d have loved to have seen in the coloring book.
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a bit more coloring
I’ve forgotten, in the interim between posting the last coloring pages and these ones, what exactly I did with the photoshop levels to make the whites so crisp and clean last time (Ellen, you posted a coloring how-to blog or something that was profoundly enlightening, but I can’t find it again!) so these colors aren’t so nice, but they’re pretty good. :)
I actually thought I’d long since posted the first of these, as it’s been done for ages, but apparently I hadn’t, so here’s two, but not the two I’d planned on posting. I’d been gonna do the two facing pages of the second page all at once so I’d be consistent with which colors I used. I did a bunch of skin tones (and kept missing entire, like, torsos, which, just, wut? I was looking SO CAREFULLY, and still missing them!) and hair (ditto missing them) but then got drawn into leaves and wolves and things and finished up one page without the other being more than a quarter done.
I believe Nightrunner (Cutter’s wolf) changes color in every single frame he’s in in these two pages. I’ve read enough comics in my life to know that’s a hallmark of professionalism. :) (Also I honestly don’t remember what color he’s supposed to be. Mostly I’m like, “Brown, wolves are grey or brown,” with the occasional moment of WAIT DEWSHINE’S WOLF IS NAMED LIONSKIN HE’S GOLD NOT BROWN that primarily goes to show just how many long-term memory brain cells I have dedicated to ElfQuest…)
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a bit of coloring
It’s taken me about two weeks to do the fourth Elfquest graphic novel coloring book page. I reckon at the rate I’m going, I’ll do about one issue a year, and be finished around 2036. :)
I hadn’t posted page three yet, so here you go. I also hadn’t figured out how to manipulate the levels with Photoshop (or possibly I didn’t have photoshop installed) yet, so the color in it isn’t as representative of the TRUE BEAUTY OF MY WORK as I might like. :)
For page four I had Photoshop for sure and the levels are therefore manipulated and this is actually very close to the colors. I’m going to need an entire box just of green pencils to get through this issue!
This is the best coloring book ever. :)
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the week got away from me
I have these plans, man. Plans to blog daily, or at least week-daily. They’re good plans! But they’re apparently not reality-based plans. :)
It’s been a busy week that doesn’t necessarily feel like I’ve gotten a lot done, but last time I said that someone said she couldn’t imagine doing as much as I do, so I’m probably wrong.
*Most* of my work time the past several days has been getting MAGIC & MANNERS soft-launched (you can buy it on Kobo! and Kindle! and Audible!), and in the next day or two as it finishes propagating through the system there’ll be a big excited launch post. That’s taken up a lot of time and brain power, but it’s WORKING, bookstores, ACTUAL BOOKSTORES are starting to be able to put orders in! AAAAHHH!!! SO EXCITING!!!
And almost as excitingly, that means all the Thinks To Do for MAGIC & MANNERS have been crossed off the To Do List, and it’s been moved to the tail end of the page where it can rest on its laurels while I…don’t. :)
We had a wee little bit of snow on Friday before school, which was very exciting indeed. We went out to play in it, because it was obviously going to be gone before school got out.
And although it took me ALL WEEK, I got the first page of my Elfquest ‘coloring book’ done, which pleases me greatly.
Ted said, “Are you going to send it to (the friend) who bought it for you, when you have it finished?” I was like, “It’s SEVEN HUNDRED PAGES, I’m going to be coloring this FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!” :)
ytd wordcount: 52,400
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lurching along, book edition
I *finally* got the proof for MAGIC & MANNERS (the freaking delivery service couldn’t find our Giant Invisible House). It’s extremely, extremely pretty, except it has precisely the error I feared it would:
See that thin blue line alond the spine side? That’s the spine color, and it’s not supposed to be there. (There’s one on the back, too.) The system’s template was confusing, and the cover artist made the same error I would have. The PDF proofs showed that blue line, but it was possible it was just a problem with the PDF, so I had to order a copy to see if it actually printed that way.
Obviously it did.
On one hand, I’ve seen plenty of books that have that kind of printing error. OTOH, they drive me insane. :) And since I *can* fix it, I’m going to. In fact, in a fit of efficiency I’d talked to the cover artist weeks ago and she’d sent me a fixed copy…except we both forgot it had to be a PDF, not a JPG, so I don’t actually have a copy I can upload tonight. Tomorrow, then, and it’ll head in for Availability the very moment it can.
I’ve gotten the e-book proofs, too, and have gone over them with as many different devices as I can, finding a small but interesting variety of Different Viewing Errors as I did so. Those have been reported to the digital conversion lady, so things continue apace. This book production thing, folks, it’s hard work. But the finished product is really startlingly lovely. I keep being astonished by it!
I finished what is technically-still-a-short-story-at-7250-words for the Patreon crew, although I had reason to be grateful it was a leap year, else I’d not have finished it in February. I’m pleased with how it turned out, and I almost certainly can round out the collection with two more stories but I’m afraid I have ideas for four and I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that.
The half-revised old novel has gone off to the Very Forgiving Cover Artist, who promises she isn’t judgy at all and will only read it for its book-cover-qualities, not its, well, half-revised state, so that’s quite exciting. That’s going to be an ebook-only release at first, until (quite frankly) I can get some money in the bank and be able to pay for things like book design and full cover art. There *will* be a print edition, though, because, well, let’s be frank: because I want one on my shelves. :) But I’m genuinely looking forward to that, because I’m actually having a lot of fun revising it.
So, in short: the next month is going to be very busy with the writing of a couple of short stories and a *great* deal of revising, because there’s IB *and* REDEEMER to get revised, the latter to send to the editor, and then of course there’s BEWITCHING BENEDICT, which I…will not, realistically, get revised in March. Not without a miracle.
And in totally not-writing-news, after I’d said on Twitter that gosh, maybe I should just get a second copy of the Dark Horse Original Quest reprint to scan and color as I saw fit, look what a friend sent me:
ONE OF THOSE PENCILS IS THE COLOR OF LEETAH’S HAIR, PEOPLE!
I sat down and started coloring the first page *immediately*. Young Indiana, who had said, “ANOTHER copy of that book?!” when I opened it, then gasped, genuinely shocked, “*Mommy*! We don’t color in WORD BOOKS!!!” I said he was right, but that this was a special extra copy of the book that someone had given me *just* so I could color in it. He relented, albeit somewhat suspiciously. :)
I have not, to my embarrassment, managed to color in the whole first page yet, even though it arrived YESTERDAY. :)
