Original Art Sundays No. 285: Sharp Invitations: Curt, p. 20

 Now that the chapter on surgery is complete, we're going back to the Curt narrative already in progress. 

We had 19 pages of our heroine (me) meeting Curt, developing a relationship and having, ahem, intimate moments with others. There was more of that, but rather than make the waters any muddier, it's time to move on, in every sense.

I left out a couple details, and a few events are not quite in the order in which they occurred, but that doesn't disrupt the veracity of the story.

The temp job was much less sophisticated than I made it look here. Nice people and fairly easy work, but pretty mindless, doing document recording and retrieval at an insurance company.

Several things about this page are quite deliberate. The only face the reader sees straight on is Curt's. This is a story about abuse, and like most such narratives, it builds slowly and becomes largely about the abuser.

 Time is very condensed here. This page represents three months. The art is serviceable, but no more. There are some obvious and deliberate exaggerations, like the hyper-extended U-Haul.

I had hoped to add a wood texture to the door, but Photoshop was missing some patterns. Rather than dink around with it, I went with a solid gray for the door.

Design consideration: to give the page a bit more weight, I used the old Terry Moore trick of adding a solid black behind the panels. In a moment of inspiration, I used his How to Draw book as a template for the shape! Just lay the book on the page and make a black outline, fill it in, and you're golden.

The tools for this week are very straightforward. Entirely Micron pens! But I haven't forsworn my beloved inks.

Tools:

• Canson Bristol
• T-squares and straightedges
• Lead holder, #3Bl leads, and erasers
• Micron .005, .2, .3, .5, .8, 1.0 and brush
• Photoshop
  

I'm also doing Inktober this year. Last time I did that, I didn't make it through the whole month, but I have high hopes this year. I have been posting my inks daily on Facebook and Twitter and will post them here weekly.

That said, next week we continue the Curt story. Current plan is to resolve this part of the narrative quick and clean, four or five more pages. Then two or three more short chapters, some hard editing decisions, and we're done with this project. I have two more comic and illustration based projects in the wings, and two text projects in the works.