And finally, a page of this. It's a remake of page 136, the last full page I posted but since the next track won't have Ricci in it now, I had to change it. Zippa makes his little opening cameo here and will continue for the track. Have already done most of the backgrounds for page 137 so that should go more quickly. My speed on this comic is nearly snail-paced.

 I got a lot of mileage out of this one sketch. Was just playing about, wanting something more energetic and less tight, so redrew the sketch in Procreate and was just very loose and slap-dash with the paint. Then I went back and played with recoloring the sketch lines until I got something I thought was more interesting and outside my usual. Sometimes you can just keep pushing and still have fun.

 Did one of these things for Instagram, an art vs. artist. I'm the one in the middle. That was a reference photo for Digby and seemed appropriate. While I  didn't get enough of the comic done this year, I do think I made a lot of progress on the portraits and for that, I'm pretty happy. City Silent allows me to go a bit more wild with distortion and color. My portraits tend to be a bit more conservative. That means I'm somewhere in between?

 Been working on the remake of page 136 as the one with Ricci doesn't work any more. I need Digby to leave the scene and needed to change the style but needed to keep the place. So I spent a lot of time tracing over the photo I used for reference. Tracing! Gah! Except it works for this and it's not just vectorizing the photos. It's also still somewhat abstract. Colors are not final but the drawing is. I'll have to do some posing soon for Digby. Then I can just go to town on the cartooning for Zippa. No chance of this getting done before New Year's but it should be soon after. Just got to get through the holidays.

 Far from any kind of finished image, this is just a test to see if what I want to do is going to work. And I think it will. I want this track to go as quickly as possible. So what the background needs is some graph, a couple of Digby's as he exits the scene and some coloring. Still need to redo page 136 but with this approach out of the way, I think I can knock that out and get this damned track rolling.

 Ok, found the brushes and the color palette for Zippa. This guy, I think, can tell a story. Just had to get a little messier with him. I went far afield from the original idea, which was to do a straight, 'rubber hose' style character in black and white. And that's fine. When paired with the right background, I think he'll still read as 'graffiti'. At least I hope so. 

Back to work after being sick again. Then dinner club. Haven't had any energy the past week to work on much of anything though I have sketched Zippa a little. They were ok, but they felt...dull. So I started looking around for more inspiration and found something that shoved me in a different direction. Still using the 'rubber hose' style as inspiration, I made things a little rougher and got something I think will finally work. Three pages of sketches and a quick spray paint sample and I'm pretty happy. Just have to work Zippa into the last page of track 6 so his entrance won't seem so sudden and I should be able to proceed.
 

 Me, Drawing Me, Drawing Me. Finally finished this. I ended up re-drawing nearly everything at some point. After talking to my buddy Vince, I knew the last step was going to be to replace the foreground mic stand as it just wasn't cutting it. I knew I wanted a limited color palette and very dulled colors as well. I think this kind of feels like a woodblock print, and I'm ok with that. I really wanted to do another portrait that had most of the figure in it. Though it wasn't originally in the composition, I added much of the real background, too. It helped add a feeling of place without taking away from the figure. That being said, I left a LOT out. There's a whole other bookcase on the other side of the door but it wouldn't have added anything and would have likely wiped out the feeling of depth given by the mic stand.

I'm hoping this will get me out of my portrait phase for a little bit and let me do some more free drawings for City Silent. That project has languished which doesn't make me happy. I am pretty pleased with the progress I've made with portraits this year, don't get me wrong, but that comic is NEVER going to get finished. And honestly, the two tracks I've done this year were leaps and bounds over what I'd done before. Well, progress is progress.

 A lot to do today, but managed to get my sound editing and some work on this done. Redid all the lines on the pants as the originals were too thick to my eye. I also added some lines to the neck that were supposed to be there. I separated the arm rest and wheel from the mic boom as the darkness wasn't working in foreground and background. Fixed the carpet and added some details to the background. I think I like it a lot better but nothing is final and I'll come back to it later.

 Some progress. I simplified the lines a lot, dropping out shadows, adding some details that weren't there before. Some of it I like. I don't know that I'm sold, but I didn't have much time to work on this as I was at the job all day. Progress in small steps. At least the head and body are married together!

 Did some work on this today, including redrawing the whole image, in parts and starting on the painting part of it. Like the last full figure, I decided to do the head separately so that I could draw it in more detail. Once it's finalized, I'll vectorize it and 'marry' it to the body. The head I'm fine with. The body I'm thinking about. It's the shadowy areas that bother me as I don't tend to do shadows in this style, so when there are some in one place but nowhere else, they stand out. Might have to do some more drawing and try and fix that. But here's where I'm at.

 I worked out a black and white version of the sketch tonight. While I think it's a successful translation, I also think it helps me decide that I really want to do a gridded drawing instead. This is just a step. A necessary one. It might seem a waste to some. That's ok. It's the end result that matters.

 Another case of me wanting to draw tonight. Was going to do the whole grid overlay thing but then decides just to do a loose sketch instead. I might develop this, might not. The foot's off, but I like the rest of it fairly well.

 I worked on the comic today but it was hard going. I've been sick the last few days and have had energy to do almost nothing. This afternoon, I was in a portrait mood again so went through my photos and pulled one out. It was a selfie of my high school friend Tony and me when we last met over the summer. I cropped me out and just drew him. It all came together really quickly, which was a nice change. I'm pretty happy with it.

After all that work with Zippa and the rubber hose style, out of nowhere, Disney released a new Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short today. *sigh* I know that people are going to think I was trying to ride on that thing. Oh, well.