Summer Drawing Challenge Day 6

You know those heaps of seaweed that pile up on the beach, making wonderful abstract patterns in intricate, green-amber tangles, like liquid stained glass? I love taking photos of them close up and seeing what kinds of compositions I can make. I’ll post some of those sometime, but that’s not what today’s drawing is about. Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this!

Last spring I started working on a script for a comic from one of my own stories, and over the fall I penciled the first 36 page chapter. I put it aside to work on Spam and the Sasquatch, but now it’s time to get back to it. It’s the tale of a farm girl who sort of accidentally runs away to sea when her only intent was to find her missing brother and haul him back to the farm. Along the way she meets some long-lost relatives, discovers an unknown civilization, finds some talents she didn’t know she had, and generally has her world-view seriously expanded! And yes, there are mermaids, and ships, and maybe even some lost treasure. I’m intending to launch it as a webcomic soon, as it is probably going to take me two or three years to get all the pages done (then I’ll publish it as a tome, though possibly do a chapter-by-chapter series as well), and I’d like to get it out in the world before then.

One thing it needs before I can put it up is a title page. So I was playing with the idea of seaweed (told you I’d get back to that!) for the letters today. I did an ink drawing from my pencil sketch, then a quick-and-dirty photoshop colouring of it to see if it was readable (I’d do the finished page in watercolour). I think it’s back to the drawing board; it doesn’t really read as strongly as I had hoped. But I like the idea, and I’ll keep playing with it. But for now, it’s today’s drawing!