Here’s the second-to-last page of the Cat short story. One more Monday and then I’m dedicating my full efforts to the main book. These short stories have been great for several things: they’ve helped me get a better idea of how I want to represent the Variables universe, they’ve forced me to brush up on my sequential layouts, and most importantly, they’ve forced me to re-think how much space I allot to dialogue bubbles. Before this point, I was used to hand-lettering pieces, meaning that they were an integral part of every step of the drawing process. I roughed out the lettering right along with the pencils so I never had to worry about giving enough breathing room for both text and images. It was all right there in front of me.

Computer lettering has changed all that. Now, lettering is added at the very end of the piece, separate from every other step of the process. It’s been an adjustment for me and some pages have been more successful than others. The last panel on this particular page is probably the weakest I’ve done thus far but the second panel is probably one of the strongest overall panels I’ve done so far. Give and take, I suppose.

Starting next week, I’ll also be posting three times every week. Comic on Monday, blog on Wednesday, art preview on Friday. The art preview will generally be the completed inks or pencils of an upcoming page, giving everyone a peek at the art in various stages of completion.

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