As a follow up to last week's "process" post, I wanted to mention that I chose to paint the images in the book out of order. I made this decision for a few reasons. One: If the painting style does happen to "evolve" a bit as you paint, I think painting the images out of order makes it less apparent to the reader. Two: it helped (psychologically) to get some of the harder paintings out of the way in the beginning. I can usually tell from the sketches which paintings might be more difficult. However, I can't tell how long difficult paintings are going to take! I'd rather have the wild cards at the beginning of my schedule than at the end. Three: it allowed me to paint some of the supporting characters in sequence. For example, there is a crow character that appears on a few spreads. I knew that I wanted to paint all of the crow images together.
Every book is different and there are probably plenty of good reasons to paint sequentially. For now though, I'll stand by my mix it up theory.
Every book is different and there are probably plenty of good reasons to paint sequentially. For now though, I'll stand by my mix it up theory.