100 Phenomena pages in sight

Before the end of the year.

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

As pages upon pages get done for the third Phenomena book, we can now see clearly one milestone approaching: the 100th page. At this point it’s absolutely clear it will happen before the end of the year, which means that when 2024 arrives we won’t be far from wrapping our trilogy of adventure and fun.

Insane and exciting to just think about it.

This week’s work

This week was mostly dedicated to inking, all the way to Thursday. I had other things I wanted/needed to do, but when I saw I’d need less then the entire week to finish inking the current batch of pages, I decided to do a hard split between things: nothing but Phenomena until inks were done and then dedicate a couple of entire days to other things (more on this below).

This is one of two options when you’re doing one main thing and a bunch of other smaller things. The second option being doing small bits around the main thing every day (or every other day) to keep it all moving. The reality is that I use both options depending on what exactly I’m doing, how I’m feeling about it and what the deadlines are.

In this case, inking was flowing specially well so it was for the best to keep it going. This sequence is part of the build up towards our big finale and there are a lot of different characters saying and doing different things. Working on it uninterrupted allows me to keep everything that happened fresh and facilitates the flow of the storytelling, avoids repeating faces/poses, keeps details and continuity in check.

I like to keep faces rotating to show new angles. This is for both variety sake and to really show the characters and give the reader a good three-dimensional feeling of each person/creature/object/place’s design.

This Spike below was shown in pencils last week.

I was especially happy with the rendering of the image below, which is a detail from a larger spread filled with characters. Lots of thin lines to create volume and depth, which will be enhanced by the introduction of grey tones on the next stage.

A curiosity on the image below: I penciled the contour of the shadow on young Boldon’s face, but decided against inking it, feeling the grey tone without contour would suffice and be less intrusive.

Now two images and two videos (linked here, since we can’t include videos on Substack). I posted a couple of videos on Instagram of drawing two different panels and below you can see the image and the inking video:

andrelimaaraujo

A post shared by @andrelimaaraujo

andrelimaaraujo

A post shared by @andrelimaaraujo

What else?

For now, as I wait for the next bit of script (and grey tones are in motion for the work show above), I spent a couple of days working on two different things: 1. organizing folders and references for the ten covers I have scheduled (6 for one series and 4 for another) and 2. Doing some secret designs for my next thing. Though I prefer to finish one book before working on another, if you have an idea (or ideas in this case) it’s mandatory as a creator that you put them down on paper. Designs can be fairly quick and can get you ahead when the time comes, allowing you to hit the ground running as you begin a new thing.

Recommendations

A quick one from one of my favorite masters: Ridley Scott. In this video he goes through his favorite shots from some of his biggest movies and the ideas that went behind it. He also talks about practical concerns - how and why he shot something - which he usually does and I always love to hear about.

Also, he’s almost 86 years old, if you can believe it. He has Napoleon out and Gladiator 2 coming soon.

One can only wish such a lengthy career and his vitality to go with it.

See you all next week!

André