The Enchanted Dagger

Here is second page of our circus spread.  It’s still very much a work in progress.  I don’t think it’s an awful start, but begs for revision.  There are two fundamental issues as I see it.  One is the panel layout.  I don’t like how the bottom panel cuts off and you can’t see the top of the big top.  One solution is to reconfigure the panels so the middle of the spread is all open and part of the bottom panels.  I might lose the top middle panel and rearrange the remaining panels so they angle down the outsides of the pages.  So that might come to pass.

more importantly, I also need to give the circus performers a better rendering.  I put a good effort into circus research, but when the time came to make the drawings, I slacked off big time.  This may have been in part because I had the aforementioned uncertainty about the layout.  Sausage making being what it is, I am historically prone to degenerate realism in my work and utilizing source material in the rendering process is a regular occurance.  This especially true of buildings and backgrounds.  With characters I try to apply a more transformative methodology, something I didn’t do with these circus performers and I think it shows.  As always, I’m mostly just trying to get to the next page, so dreaded halfassedness sometimes creeps in!