Sarah's Sketches

So my daughter is sick and she has been watching the new "How to Train your Dragon" Christmas special. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't seen it, because it's pretty charming, but by three-year-old logic there is a reasonable expectation that at the end of the film you might see a baby night fury dragon. And you don't. So to cheer my little lady up, I told her I'd draw her one. :) Also, this is a bit of a test for me inking-wise. Thanks to Josh Ulrich of Jackie Rose awesomeness for the heads up, I got a very cheap copy of Manga Studio during the Black Friday deals on Amazon and am now trying to figure it out. I'm a pretty nervous inker with real ink, but I love the look of it and really want to ink the new comic. So far, I have to admit, I'm pretty in love with this program. You will get to see more of my MS dabbling when I post page three of the new comic...

All systems go! Well, almost. I'm still waiting on a cable to connect my Cintiq to my new computer, but other than that, get ready for some comic pages! If you are just stopping by for the first time, I don't have a webpage set up for this story yet, but you can find page one here.

Page two is complete, but since my computer died this week I'm unable to post the whole thing. In the meantime, here is the first panel of page two. :) My husband and I were talking about story this morning and it got me thinking about why I believe story structure is so important. To me, story structure is like a puzzle. There are no set in stone rules, but like a puzzle, every piece should fit into the overall image. And when you have your puzzle assembled correctly, you should be able to look at all the little pieces and have that "Ah! So that's why that needed to go there," feeling. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have new pages up soon.

Here is page one of my new graphic novel. I'll share the title after I post this opening scene. It's not called 'Blue'. I'll post the first few pages here on the blog, and when I post the title page, I'll set up an archive on my website. I will try to post new pages as often as I can, but since I'm juggling several projects, not to mention being a stay-at-home mom, I'm not going to commit to a weekly post. However, I do hope to post new pages regularly and will do my best to update twitter, facebook and google plus when I post to make it easier to read along. If there is interest in a mailing list, I'll set that up too. Happy reading! Or... well... maybe unhappy reading... you don't know what sort of story this is yet. :)