Author notes

Ch. 12 Page 7 and 8

dragonsong12

on March 7, 2010

All right everyone, get ready for my patented long author’s notes of doom!

Two pages today! I didn’t think either one really would stand alone as an update well, but together, they progressed quite a bit, so I worked all week to get two pages done, and here you go!

But yeah, despite Tren’s temper, this still is a bit of a deviation from character for him. How’d he get to this point anyway?
Well, to be honest, the original plan was to show you all the entire process of what had happened to him. I know I mentioned in some previous author’s notes that I had cut a bunch of stuff out. The plan was to show everything Tren was going through and to break that up by cutting away to all that the others were going through, so it would not only show Tren, but it would’ve allowed Bradley and Ser-den more recovery time.
So what happened?
Well, I wanted to make sure I got it all right, and since the humans look upon boetheri as animals, they’d probably treat them as such, so I decided to do a little research into dogfighting. …and 5 minutes after starting said research, I felt like either throwing up, or crying, or possibly throwing up while crying. So now I was faced with a dilemma. I couldn’t do the research, but I didn’t want to just g in blind and get it all wrong. So then it occurred to me that if I didn’t show the process, then how he got from point A to point B would be left to your imaginations, which would be far worse than anything I could show. Bwah ha ha haa.
I’m pretty pleased with that decision for Tren’s part of the story, but unhappy about the fact that Bradley and Ser-den are just BAM! Back on their feet. I’ve been trying to draw them to show that they still aren’t 100%, but if I’d taken the time to show their recovery without something to off set it, it would’ve been pretty dull, so you just have to take what you can get, I guess.

On another note, this part of the story is actually forcing me to learn how to draw action scenes a bit, since they’ve always been a weakness of mine. I’m pleased with the final result of this page, but it’s a learning process and I still don’t always get it right. And here’s the proof. The second page here originally had a different final panel, but I hated the art on it, so I completely re-drew it. (fixed the link) On another page, I probably would’ve left it along, but I liked the rest of this too much to let the final panel ruin it. But I like the way the scars looked on the old page better, so I decided to scan it in at the point that I stopped and show you guys. I had actually already started on the inking before deciding that I hated it too much and changing it, so you can see a bit of the process in this too.

I think that’s enough babbling from me. So thanks for reading! See you next week!