Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.
Last week I had to skip Castrum due to a cramped weekend. Things went downhill the Monday before, where I found myself sick and unable to do anything at all. I recovered quickly, but the situation forced me to spend the rest of the week catching up after a lost day.
Things went smoother this week and I wrapped issue one of three on my detour from Project Red.
One down, two to go
As I mentioned recently, I took advantage of the fact that I got the three scripts for this detour and I worked on layouts/thumbnails for all of them. That means that the moment I upload one issue, I immediately begin penciling the next one - which is exactly what happened this week. After delivering the first issue on Tuesday, I turned to next one and I’m already seven pages of pencils into it.
Secrecy is required for now, but I can show you some finished black and white art of the pencil sneak peeks I posted a few weeks ago:
Lots of happy faces.
I’ve also worked on an idea for the second cover of these issues. The idea came to mind as I was working on layouts, then I forgot all about it but it hit me again like a truck a couple of days ago. I hastily put it together before it went away for good and it will be the priority for the next week, as solicitations are always around the corner. The rest will be nothing but penciling pages away.
Then a week off, which means that it is very likely that there won’t be any Castrum Lusitania until the end of the month. Maybe.
Recommendations
If you're looking for historical podcasts, The Rest Is History is very, very good. The six episodes series on the Franks (covering the end of the Roman Empire all the way to Charlemagne's coronation and his heirs) is particularly tasty and you can find the complete playlist here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEbAHi3fZpuGe8ekdHDF7lLHiZo8vENbQ
There’s an even bigger series on their channel about Carthage, covering the foundation of the city, the Punic Wars and much more. The channel is absolutely ripe with great chats, very funny and witty like only the British can be, but at the same time very well documented and solid.
I’ll be going through lots of these as I work in the next few days.
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I’ll see you soon (ish)
Keep doing your thing,
André