Keeping Up

With the past couple of years taken up with work for Dark Horse, I'd forgotten that turning out five pages every two weeks is a very different matter, in terms of what it does to your free time, to producing twenty-two pages every two months.

With the hurly-burly of turning out Stickleback, I've almost lost track of the fact that The Great Game is finally out; to quote myself, I can believe it's real because I've finished it, it's out, and I've cashed the cheque. I've checked it over for mistakes, and with the exception of one page where I accidentally used an over-saturated blue, it's come out well; such things can be fixed for the collection, anyway. I daren't try reading it yet, though; this close to the finish, it's too dispiriting to realize you've spent ten months of your life on something that can be absorbed in less than half an hour.

Back in July, I posted the above photo from when I'd been doing layouts for Great Game part 4 in a cafe one afternoon; I deliberately used a small picture so the drawings in the sketchbook wouldn't be legible. If you've bought issue 4, have a look at the enlargement below, and see if you can work out which page I was roughing out.

Pages from Issue 4 of The Great Game; sadly, the old Rotring Art Pen shown here "died" a month or so later.