Some good winter progress.  This is always a productive time of year.  I’ve managed to work thru most of the final 8 pages of edag issue 7, getting them drawn up pretty tight and most of the color flats.  I’ve made a point of not leaving as much undrawn elements as I tolerated in the first load of pages, area that I now have to go back and address.  But, it seems like I could have issue 7 in pretty goood shape by march 20, the traditional start of labor season at the day job.  If that’s the case, I might go ahead and start posting issue 7 after the end of this, the last of the Robert Pious illustrated Kalthar stories!  We’ll see how the next month goes…

It had been my hope that I would start a pencil draft of the second Purple Hairy Man story in March…but its feeling that I should squash issue 7 for good this winter.  I’m thinking I can take my less intensive summer/fall work environment to draw up the pencils for this second story the old fashioned way…with a pencil on paper on a clipboard, sitting in a car.   its only 20 pages… you might recall I worked out the page layouts and some of the thumbnails of this phm story on paper last summer…. I like the idea of devoting summer and fall to Phm… I mentioned in a recent post that i had been inspired and came up with a great PHM adventure story to back up my early efforts..  I have since begun to plot it out page wise….its clocking in at 80 pages!  I need to get it down to 60 to get a nice soft cover print of it so I get to refine it now…. will it also be ready to draw next fall?

That would leave the final climactic block of Enchanted Dagger pages to break down… about 50 pages… the well earned, emotionally stirring, final action sequence and then the coup de grace and aftermath.  issue 9 is going to be a pleasure to draw out… i might even milk it…. but that 30 page fight against the druid’s skeleton army….that’s gonna be fun to draw, i hope…err or maybe not!   I’ll probably have so much talking it only works out to 20 pages of relentless, brain numbing action…  So that’ll be up for processing next winter, i figure….