Weekly Update - 167 (Patreon)

Today's preview comes from Page 41... I kinda decided it needed a complete redo of all of its lines. I don't know what I was thinking, but for a few pages in early Chapter 3 my linework got super thick and like, EXTRA sloppy? It looks awful to me, even compared to many of the pages in Chapter 2.

The problem, of course, is that if I fix the lines, I have to then fix the flats (which you can see I haven't done yet in this preview), and if I fix the flats I have to redo the shading and lighting... it's a gross cascade of work.

Last week I managed to get a few more pages done though, and I'm tackling the hardest pages first so they are going slower than most of the remaining ones will. However, overall progress might be a little misleading because I also added five pages that were already "done" to the list. I want to revisit these five pages and touch them up a little further just because of their importance to the beginning of the story. (Listed below, Pages 1, 2, 4, 9 and 12) Those should be quick though, and those are the only pages I'll be revisiting before calling this thing done.

Anyway, depending on how I do this month, I'm still hoping to get the book done by ~towards the end of August. Once I get the book into the hands of Fenris Publishing, they said it'll take two months to edit, print and distribute. but I'm guessing it'll take me another month at least, maybe a month and a half to finish out the rest of this work, which could push us more towards September-ish, barring any more obstacles.

But August 8th will be the comic's five-year anniversary. It'd be nice to get our first book out in or near August at least.

Major Touchups - Pages that need not quite a full redraw, but they still are in desperate need of some serious fixes to the art:

Page 41 (Current in progress), 42, 44, 50, 52

Standard Touchups - Pages that will receive more or less the same treatment as most of the pages that are already done, with focus mostly on face structural problems and shading cleanups:

Page (1, 2, 4, 9 12) 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 43, 47. 48

Minor Touchups - Pages that will receive only minor art changes, slight cleanups only:

Page 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 45

Text Format Only - Pages that will receive almost no art changes at all, just updates to the font and borders:

Page 46, 53, and 54

I feel pretty motivated to get this done, as actually finishing it seems like it's becoming more and more of a reality. Hopefully I can keep up the momentum once I'm past all the tough pages!

I know I almost never say it, but your comments and feedback on everything I blather on about are always welcome, so if you see a page on here you don't think needs to be redrawn, or if you think a page listed in Minor Touchups needs a serious redraw, please speak up!

Why go to all this trouble in the first place? Because books cost money, and I know I won't feel good selling books to people unless I know I put some serious effort into stuffing them with value. So I'm gonna just keep grinding away, one page at a time, one panel at a time, until it's done!