#stormcalmer

Every time I tell a story with magic, I get to decide how I want to showcase that magic. As much as I enjoy the design phase of a piece of art, I honestly can never seem to decide on the magic effects until it’s on the final page, and I can see how it looks in a composition.

I’ve tentatively got a solid visual representation, with occasional glow as needed. I try to go easy on glow, because it can quickly get out of hand! For those who work digitally, the glow effect here is an overlay layer, color white, or a light version of the magic’s color.  That’s another fun fact: not every color works well for a bright glow. It has to do with how chroma varies between different colors. Wavelength stuff.

This is actually the bottom of one page, and the top of the next. The cool perk of having a limited color palette is that, no matter how wildly different two pages seem, they will be linked by shared colors (the first is very desaturated greys, and the page turn feels like a burst of color in comparison, even though these colors are also desaturated). This is my first time working with a range this limited, so it will be interesting to see what decisions I have to make when I put multiple characters together. Right out of the gate, I had to use two different magic (or special accent) colors in one page.

Once again, tools don’t matter. 

But also, they do.

I’ve been trying out the Pilot Hi-Tec-C .04 for sketching, and boy is it fun! It’s a 100% normal gel pen, but it’s smooth, with a nice needle-tip point. I’ve been trying to loosen up, especially in wider shots where there should be less detail, and this pen is helping me to do so! It’s very precise, yet as soon as it touches down, it writes, so I can’t get too concerned over mistakes.

It’s given me some of my favorite sketches (this one is TINY!) and is helping me to look at my final linework in a new way. Speaking of final work...

StormCalmer Pitch Updates

Being an author/illustrator is incredibly fun and rewarding, because you get to touch more than one aspect of bringing a book to life. Sometimes I play all of the roles from idea to shipping off final products (minus the printing!), so I can get the full thrill of creation.

Working with limited palettes is really interesting! Even if you’re only using two colors, you still have to decide whether you will use all of the permutations that those two colors make. Art is all about decisions. The more you create, the better you get at decision making.

I’m currently working on using fewer and fewer colors, that all work harmoniously. Here, I could take out that base color of green, but then I wouldn’t have quite so many yellow variations. Does that matter? It’s up to me!

Do I get to change the saturation (richness of the color)? The tone (how much black is in it)? Again, it’s all up to me! So I get to make image after image, testing out all of my options.

How you apply the colors matters too. Same palette, different ways to apply the color.

StormCalmer

Chapter One

StormCalmer

Chapter One

StormCalmer

Chapter One