Well, that went sooner than I thought! Still so much to learn about ComicPress and what it considers a “new day”!

This will be the last page until Saturday, so I figured I would share the making of page 5 with you. As all pages do, it starts with a thumbnail sketch, to capture the angle of the shot and the basic visual elements of the page. Before anything is drawn, Rachel and I discussed the area being shown in the page. This is one of many scroll libraries inside the great Spire of Gair, and this one in particular – a well-guarded room at the peak of the Spire – encompasses the most important historical tomes in the land.

The initial thumbnail occasionally winds up being very different from the final page as we iterate on various elements, but in this case, as you can see, the basic layout of this first thumbnail remained near-identical to the final product – the big changes being where the text was positioned about the panels.

After we settled on the thumbnail, Rachel took to work on fleshing out the design of the room. As you can see in the work-in-progress page above, keeping the perspective properly set played a big part in the second panel during this initial phase. However, the hard work was yet to come.

The scrolls! Goodness, the scrolls! Rachel realized early on that to really give the library the proper vibe, it would need to be cluttered. While drawing cluttered libraries is more the purview of Sean Rubin (whose library-drawing skills are told in ballads across the land), Rachel took admirably to the task, cluttering up those shelves and cubbies with a variety of scrolls and books all presented at different angles, as would befit a rounded room.

Once the clutter was added in, it was a few more passes for color and lighting, and adding the appropriate Felis text to the floor.

Starting on Saturday, we actually get to see what’s in those scrolls!