Pushing Off from Shore | (detail) pencil on vellum

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This marks the beginning of the final drawings in this process and I thought this spread would be a fitting start. While the end is not yet clearly in sight, it’s getting closer.

In anticipation of the task ahead, I’ve doubled my caffeine consumption from 2 mugs of coffee in the morning, to 2 mugs of coffee in the morning plus 2 mugs of earl grey tea in the afternoon.

I underexposed the photo of the illustration a bit – it’s actually less contrasty than it appears above.

The very first study, January 10, 2009.

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Yesterday, I cleaned the studio; I haven’t seen the top of my desk in many months. Today, a year and 8 months or so after starting work on the roughs, I’ll begin work on the finals. I find this a terrifying prospect. I’ve spent the entire development stage planning for this, deciding on approach, plotting colours. Thinking about paper, materials, medium. Doing little experiments along the way to try to figure stuff out. This is the point where hopes are either dashed or realised. Potential quashed or surpassed. All possible approaches will be narrowed down to one solution and that’s, quite frankly, frightening. So I’m going to procrastinate for a while longer by writing this blog post.

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page spread – colour rough and greyscale (digital colour over rough sketch).

Sometimes the line drawing gets confusing, so I find it’s necessary to drop some colour in there to see if the composition will still work.