I’m feeling a little quantum just now. The myriad potentialities of adding the dialogue to Spam and the Sasquatch have now been collapsed into one sleek and unified whole, and the story is complete.

It still remains to do the cover and the necessary inside pages (title, copyright, thank-yous, ISBN etc.) but the bulk of the work is done, and I am pleased. Most of the artwork is done traditionally, in pen and ink and watercolour, with some slight adjustments in Photoshop for cleanup (I sometimes go over the panel lines with my overenthusiastic brush) and compensation for the scanner’s tendency to wash out the colour. The layout, dialogue, and captions were all done in InDesign.

As an informal unveiling, here are the front splash page and a couple of interior pages from near the beginning of the story. There are links in the captions to a couple of earlier versions I’ve posted.

This is the first page. I posted some progress shots of this earlier. I added some more traditional media (watercolour, gouache, acrylic ink) but eventually needed to do some glazing that I knew would only muddy the colours, so I went digital with Photoshop, That also allowed me to put in the cool (um, hot?) effects in the background fire.

The next two are a double-page spread; I put them here individually so they would show up larger.

Spam gets the commission that sets him off on the path of Sasquatch hunting. The middle panel first appeared in a practice painting I posted as one of my drawing-a-day pieces.

Mama eagle tends to get frustrated easily when conversing with cats.

(In case you’re just tuning in: Spam and the Sasquatch is an upcoming graphic novel written by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough with visual storytelling by me! Currently I’m posting several times a week rather than daily; my regular Technique-of-the-Week Saturday posts are on hold until I get this project wrapped up. )