The day after I post that sumptuous Frazetta art---here's some crappy scribbling from me. I'm still recovering from that nasty bug but felt well enough to start laying out a page of Lonely Boy (Rol's Pjang script), only I realised I hadn't actually designed any of the characters. Normally I could make this up as I went but the script features a bunch of 13 year olds. Drawing kids is always difficult and I have no real experience doing so and as I'll be using clean line for this 8-pager, I have to make every line count. That's another problem as every line made possibly adds age to a face, so I decided to take a while to quickly sketch out a few designs and (no Gary Glitter gags here) feel out the kids, trying to get them looking like kids and not adults.

The girls featured are just exercises in hairstyles so I'll probably end up using a variety of them and while the faces for the kids don't really look 13 (the lower three boys being deliberately thuggy looking oiks so not exactly innocent anyway!), I'm hoping I'll be able to pull off the look with the body sizes. I'll either get to work tomorrow or on Tuesday after this weekend in Brum.

I've also developed another little side-project, partly inspired by Beano artist and Gilbert & Sullivan-defamer Laura Howell's page-a-day cartoon idea on Facebook (Travis Charest's Spacegirl collection is also partly responsible too). I'm hoping to use my lunch breaks to facilitate this little notion (well, after I finish reading the current copy of Back Issue, which I only started today so don't expect anything for a while) but I'm not quite sure of the finer details. I've already drawn two four-panels strips that I'm gonna photocopy and was initially going to use to try and draw an episode of a longer story each day. I figured five (days a week) time four panels over four weeks comes to 80 panels, about 13 pages if using the 60s six panel a page ratio.

Then I realised that I only have about 45-50 minutes from each lunch break (after munching through lunching while quickly whizzing about online) and that occasionally I'll have to nip off for errands down the high street. Then I further realised that while this is intended to be an exercise in "pure" artwork (in that it will only be roughly laid out before inking so that most of the drawing will be done in the inks without the benefits of any reference to fine tune details--so don't go expecting any cars or bikes but don't be surprised to find a story set in space somewhere!), I don't actually know how fast I'll be able to get a tier done. Lettering would probably be done after the art when I do the erasing of any pencil at home before I scan them in and post them online.

I'll have to see what my work rate will be like before I finally settle on a definite course of action: I doubt I'll be able to do a strip a day with such a short window of time, so I'll see what I can do then probably build up a backlog before posting them one a day. We shall see...

In the mean time, I'll probably post more stuff here Monday...