One section of the story calls for “menacing Art Deco”. Still need to practice that. Atom looks mildly worried; that’s a good start.

This one turned out a little too monochrome – too many washes of essentially the same colors. It’s supposed to be a dim bar, but not a dull picture. The composition is too symmetrical. And that bowtie, ugh, don’t even get me started.

That’s not where he was supposed to be walking, but that’s where he ended up.

The original version was too bland; this version is too dire. Fun to really lay on the ink, though.

I forgot to paint the cigar. It looks like he’s chomping on a dry erase marker.

I abandoned the page on which this panel appeared; couldn’t get the paint to do what I wanted. It got too fuzzy, and it looks like either my scanner or graphics program added an additional layer of cotton wool. It’s cool though—the new version is drawn better.

A colorful Smithson panel in gouache and ink. Looking at this new, vibrant scan, I’m startled to realize how terrible my old scanner was.

Here’s a panel from the first draft of the book, done in late 2008. Mostly watercolor with some touch-ups in gouache. For the new version I’m drawing at a larger size and have hopefully learned a few more things about watercolor.

I had so much fun doing a page from Farewell, My Lovely for the Page 100 Project, I decided to do another strip. This one’s adapted from P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster Sees It Through. (It’s not page 100 of the book, though, so I didn’t submit it to the P100P.) I’m going to start working “try that one on your bazooka” into every conversation and see where it gets me.

This is also a test of the lettering process I was planning to use for The Sweetened By-and-By. Hmmm.

Speaking of Wodehouse and comics, if you like both of those things it’s worth your while to pick up a copy of the SPX 2003 anthology (currently about $3 on Amazon) for the short story “The Travels of Cadmus” by Joel Priddy. (Sample image here.) It’s a nicely drawn story and Priddy nails the Wodehouse voice in his tale of a very Wooster-like mythical hero.

Here’s my entry for Jason Turner’s Page 100 Project, adapted from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. Click on the image to see a larger version that’s probably twice as confusing. And do click through to his website to see the other pages people have created.

I spend a lot of time thinking about process. How to make my art more quickly without sacrificing quality, how to organize images and tools. Comics can be very labor-intensive—layout, researching, penciling, inking, lettering, and so on—so another element to think about is how to keep the whole process fun.

I look at the work of some of the artists I admire—Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Eddie Campbell—and their art looks like it was a blast to make: elastic, playful, but with solid draftsmanship behind it. Of course a prized artistic skill is to make it all look effortless, no matter how much the artist sweated over it.

The panel on the top left follows my first stab at a working process for The Sweetened By-and-By: working out the lettering and balloon shapes on tracing paper, penciling a rough sketch in the space that’s left, inking the balloon shapes and panel lines on watercolor paper, lightboxing the pencil rough onto the watercolor paper, doing a finished drawing in ink, and finally painting. I also scrubbed out the wash on Atom’s suit to make it look shabbier (and to try to improve the contrast with the background), and added some colored pencil on the suit and wall to give it some texture. Whew!

After all that I needed a break, so I went directly to the next panel and brushed on some paint. I tried to suggest some forms with quick daubs of ink. And then I went in with the pen to refine the drawing. Then more black shapes, and a few more washes. Then some additions (dots, highlights) and corrections (the two barstools at left) with white gouache and ink. Much less regimented than the previous panel, and more fun. The downsides: I didn’t plan out the lettering, so I spent time drawing art that is destined to be covered by a balloon. And the drawing, though it was fun to do, isn’t as rigorous as I would like.

So my goal now is to hit a happy medium between these two approaches. Maybe I’ll only do a very rough pencil guide on the watercolor paper, and mostly improvise with the pen (as I did in the bottom right panel.) Or put down a few washes after the balloons, but before picking up the pen. We’ll see. And that will be what keeps it fun.