It haunted me throughout the week and the more I thought of it the more I thought I'd made a mistake in the conception of the novel. I had planned on suggesting the heavy glare of the North Queensland sunlight a character in itself, constraining all the human characters by its power to prevent clear vision. To that end I inked without tone and only minimal hatching or feathering to advance the starkness of the light.
At some point (apart from a series of unexpected obstacles that impeded progress along the way) I looked back at most of the presentation sketches I'd done and felt uncomfortable at their flatness which robbed the lines of a lot of their expression (visible in some cases in the pencil lines left in). So I tried some toning. When you tone you have to make a decision at an early stage on how much you want the tones to suggest depth and how much pen work you want to do the same thing. A combination can work but it has to be carefully done to avoid looking like overbaking. Using only tones in black lines is more common but requires expert use of combination to get where you want. And then if I did that I'd lose the glare.
So, I started looking at photos of the real setting, the pale rust of the sand, the bleached high blue of the sky and the jade grey of the seawater brought everything else back as nothing else had. It brought me back into each frame I experimented with. Soon enough I started seeing the whole story in colour and as I draw to get the characters and hues right I am also doing something I haven't for a while, looking forward to working on The Monsoons.
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