Next page of the story. For continuity, this story comes after the squirrel story and before the job story. I've been reorganizing the book. While there's still much work to do, I'm pleasantly surprised by the progress I've made.
When we left, Mother was patching together a life for herself and her five kids.
I made a text change to the previous page, throwing in a line about my baby brother. I am reposting that before the new page.
Hm. Posting multiple pages reinforces narrative. I've made this observation before, but it's easy to forget.
When I started this book, I prepared a 64 page outline/template. This part of the story was a point where things were about to change for the better. I reviewed the outline, and found I was about to leave out some vital background information. After a couple experiments, I found the layout in the outline was almost exactly what was needed. This page sets up the evolution of the family and builds on my childhood. It also shows Mother's character in the grape incident! To this day, I try not to "sample" in stores.
Art notes: This page is sparse, but it works. I'd like to push these pages a bit farther in terms of light/dark, but my work tends to be fairly bright. More dark on upcoming pages, so perhaps balance is a good thing. I made a layout gaffe in setting up the page, but was able to make it work anyway. Fortunate, since I didn't discover the problem until I was almost done! Using the old saw of adding line for background texture in panels two and three. First panel: maybe it could be darker. I tried a couple things on overlays, wasn't happy with the results, and decided to leave well enough alone.
In the original layout, the turkey panel was another group shot. I didn't want to overuse that, especially as we had a full family shot on the previous page, so decided to just do the bird, so to speak. In general, a pretty straightforward page. Necessary to the story, but not stunning. I'm happy with it anyway.
New tools this week: Added a .25 Copic marker and a Pentel click eraser to the toolbox. Otherwise, largely the same as on past pages.
Next: the brush.
