experimenting working

[egypturnash]

Working on a complex piece of art. I was hoping to have it done today but it's taking longer than I'd thought - plus, of course, time lost to stupid damn GTA: San Andreas. Rik brought it in, and I can't not play it, even though everything about its worldview is utterly vile, and it really feels like a huge pile of all the half-baked ideas they ever had during the history of the series - yes, let's have a mission that pretty much exists to teach you to swim that can only be accessed after you've spent a lot of time swimming, and how about having some "real" airplanes in there too, with horribly persnickity flight training missions?

Anyway, enough ranting about this tar baby I've been quietly stuck to this past week: mixing in a lot more fast pencil tool definition of shapes, all in monochrome*, seems to be working. But I need to be damn sure I've spent enough time on my sketches in the real world; having something crisp to work under seems to be essential, and these are kinda loose and sloppily-scanned.

I still need to figure out a few ways to get a more "organic" feel to really have what I want for The Drowning City, or an acceptable compromise. But I'm getting close to something I think will work. And starting to work out the mechanics of my process of moving from page thumbnail to tight pencil rough (printer sharing is involved)...

* the same 'tints of a rich black swatch' trick I did on my last piece