I finally finished 7 Pirates last week. All up I think it was a 21 month journey. The last month or so was a heavy crunch to get the last pages colored. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Although in my typical artist self-loathing opinion... some of the first few pages are a bit spotty :> I wont post any of the later pages (spoiler police...) but here are a few from the middle of the book.

sorry, no words. The lettering is in French and I only have access to the high res files without it.

A Look at the process I am going through for the 7 Pirates pages atm.

The layouts here (done by Jérôme Lereculey) are quite fleshed out, and as I mentioned earlier, It was quite a task to figure out how to interpret them when I started. I have been keeping quite close to the composition. Mostly because the idea to have someone else do the layouts in the first place was to limit the amount of back and forward with the writer and editor concerning small changes to the storytelling. which, with a language barrier might have been messy. Not to mention time consuming. Also, I find if the composition of a panel is working well, changing small parts of it can cause a domino effect (which normally ends badly!). The upside of having to work like this is that I now understand a lot more about where exactly certain elements of the art lie. Obvious really, but it never occurred to me how much the composition and posing of a character influenced how they come across. Because even though I designed all the characters at the start and Jerome then used them as reference, his interpretation of how they would act changed the way I viewed the story. So in some ways the end result is much more of a mix of his style and mine than I thought it would be. And of course having to draw someone else's poses forced me to get over weaknesses that I would have otherwise covered up. I have changed the workflow I use a few times over the course of the project. At the moment, I am printing the layouts at about A4 size, tracing the basic placement of everything. working out any perspective properly. And then doing a rough version of the page at that size. Then I scan that rough and print a larger blue line version which I do final lines over. Then scan and remove the blue in PS etc. Before that I was doing roughs at full size. And before that I was just drawing the rough with a light pencil on the final bit of art board. and then doing a more finished line with darker pencil. I chose the page above because it’s a more recent one done the way I am currently working. But it’s probably not my favorite page ;) and doesn’t show how good some of the layouts are that I get. So here’s another one of page 23 which I showed a colored version of in my last post...