Lines against the enivronment

I'll often dither over how I want to draw a character. If they are to be the central character most of all. I drew Gail for years to my satisfaction, each time significantly different, more or less iconic here more realistic there. Characters in longer stories need to be repeatable and imaginable as though their environment (however stylised) has a third dimension. As apects of The Monsoons grew more serious the related book The Coast verged on horror the first thing I wanted to steer clear of was self conscious irony. Cute bunnies and mice hacking each other up is Jim Woodring's territory for starters. Plus, as a stand against blaringly obvious irony in all kinds of popular art I settled on making the characters more or less realistic. I needed to keep them more or less flexible as well as they had a lot of acting to do in the later chapters.

So, the more I drew Gail the more I wanted to draw something realistic but still cartoony enough. It got so I drew her differently each time and the result of all of them was a mass of incompatibility. Then I drew this:

Actually, what I drew was a pencil sketch. This is a tracing with pen and brush. It's the first sketch that gets everything right, mostly her character. She's listening to Marty ramble on about how their friends are grasping to false memories and she's about to give him a serve. At the same time she's watching her friends din past the beach in a speedboat. The noise is beating at her hangover. She's deciding if it would be cruel to  humiliate Marty, especially when he's right.

From that I got this sketch which is a flash forward to her one year on, facing something a lot nastier than she is above:

Oh, in case you're wondering why all these pictures are sketches rather than anything more finished it's because I want to keep this blog strictly about the process rather than the result. If I finish and publish we'll all have a hearty laugh of satisfaction at seeing the polished end.