The End

Hey all, this chapter is done! After today, there are 3 pages left, and I’m scheduling them right now to go up every Tuesday until they run their course on April 21st. I’m starting work on the next chapter today (mostly just prep-work, I’ll be lucky if I get to thumbnailing), and will be working on the cover while Cory knocks a rough script out based on my thumbnails. So let’s get to the important question at hand, here–what’s the plan going forward?

Schools were supposed to open up again in the second week of April, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. In fact, I’d really be surprised if they’ll open the schools back up again at all until next September, especially since it looks like the government in my province is stepping in with a more structured format for home schooling, which is, understandably, going to take up a lot of my time. I’ve been thinking about what kind of output this means that I’ll be able to do, and I wanted to ask the readers what they’d prefer.

OPTION ONE

Option one is that I continue to put out pages at the quality I currently put them out, but the release schedule is going to be slow and unpredictable, and I’m not sure I can guarantee even once a week. The time I prep everything for flatting to the time a page is completely coloured can be anywhere from 6 hours to 20 hours depending on the difficulty of the page, and while the results will definitely be nice to look at, I will essentially have to decide to operate on a ‘when it’s done, it’s done’ schedule until the quarantine lifts. I can’t even really hold out for summer vacation if the quarantine still stands, because we won’t have the usual family/friends/play dates/day camps to lean on to give me time to just work.

OPTION TWO

Option two is basically that, for the time being, I letter and publish pages in their pre-flatting, pre-colouring state, but with a little bit more clean-up and attention than I usually give them in regards to light sources, adding flats for darker hair colours, and so on. Here’s a collage of what those pages tend to look like:

While I can’t really give an average on how long it takes me to colour pages usually because they vary so wildly, I can say pretty securely that with few exceptions, getting a batch of 4 to 7 pages from prep to sketch to ink to flatprep (this stage) takes me about a week of full time work, and then I tend to colour the pages one at a time to make sure they get up on time. I will absolutely be able to post more pages in this format and colour them when this is all over and I can make time in my schedule to do that. How many more pages? I legit have no idea, but I am willing to find out if you’d rather actually getting more of this story in a timely manner than having pages in their usual state of polish at an extremely slow rate.

I would absolutely love your input, but if you don’t feel like leaving a comment, please do this poll! I’ve turned off the option to view votes as they happen live to prevent vote-spamming one way or another, and our decision won’t solely rely on the poll results, because we’re very interested in feedback in the comments and want that to count for whatever decision we make going forward.

[yop_poll id=”4″]

Lastly, I absolutely have a preference here (if that wasn’t obvious)–while I love how our pages look full colour, I’d rather be updating and keeping this story moving than giving you one very nicely coloured page every few weeks. If you really don’t mind waiting for coloured pages, I’ll do that, but, again, I’d really prefer to keep the story moving even if it means co colour.

Anyhow, I hope everyone is staying home and staying safe. See you next Tuesday!