Quick update

A very short, and very quick post before I leave, just to announce this:

Next update of The Darkest Hour on Saturday 11 July.

There will be four pages!

(I can promise that because I've already drawn them :D...)

The Darkest Hour 28-31

Four pages this time instead of three! There are two reasons:
1) it would have been awkward to break off after page 30;
and
2) I wanted to do a little extra because I won't be posting for two weeks in a row. I will be travelling and won't have access to a scanner.

I'm feeling a bit apprehensive about the coming pages because they will contain battle scenes and horsemen... Not easy.

Meanwhile I'm re-reading Vagabond and trying to study Takehiko Inoué's way of using the space of a small manga page. I keep getting distracted by the story, though :P.

The Darkest Hour, 25-27

This week the story came rather more fluently than the last. In terms of drawing, page 25 was actually intended to look quite different from the way it does now, but as usual the perspective went spectacularly wrong and so I had to make everything much simpler to avoid the page looking utterly and completely inept. ...Yes, well. Page 26, then, is basically Talking Heads in Funny Places, but then sometimes I do need to pass on some information at short notice :-). Will be made to look right in the final version, never fear. Page 27, finally, is rather more pleasing to the eye, or so I like to think. I used pencils instead of ink, by way of experiment. I don't intend to start pencilling the storyboard from now on. It's just that I have been thinking about rendered pencils for the final version of The Darkest Hour, and I used this page as a kind of try-out. It doesn't have any backgrounds or anything, but it does allow me to assess what clean pencils might look like scanned, and what the contrast can be like.

Please let me know what you think!

As usual, click for readable pages :-).

The Darkest Hour 22-24

I don't know why, but this week's pages were difficult. They will need some work for the final version. Story-wise, I think they are mostly okay, but graphically... *sigh*

Next week better?

Click for readable text.