Graphic Novel Progress: Inks are underway!

I finally got the go-ahead to begin inks about a month ago, so I've been spending a lot of time chipping away at those! While I can't show too much, you can see a couple of pages in the gallery above! I'm also going to talk a little bit about the process, which may be slightly less exciting!

Inking this has been a big learning experience for me in a lot of ways. Tonally, this book is a lot different from the sorts of books I've worked on in the past; it's a lot sillier, so I've had to really loosen up the way I draw. Actually, the second reason I've had to loosen up is that it's also much longer than anything I've worked on in the past. Sprite and the Gardener was 70~ pages and Grace Needs Space was 190~, whereas this one is supposed to come in at 260~! So I've had to be much more selective about which pages get how much care, but honestly, sometimes the results are pretty fun.

I'm currently about 1/4 through inks. After that I'll be moving on to colors, and after that I'll be finalizing lettering. The lettering is technically supposed to be finished alongside inks, but unfortunately I ran into multiple hurdles that, together, are making the lettering process a headache!:

1) It turns out Clip Studio doesn't support certain OpenType font features, meaning I'll need to letter in Photoshop.
2) But if I letter in Photoshop and then go back to Clip Studio to complete the art, I'll run into the previous issue again. So lettering will need to be added after the art is completed, BUT I want to draw the word bubbles in Clip Studio, plus I need to know how much room to leave in each panel to make sure nothing important gets covered up by text.
3) On top of all that, we're waiting on the completion of a custom font using Joe Whitt's handwriting.

In the end, I settled on putting in placeholder lettering, which works well enough. The only downside is that I'll need to go back and replace all of it with the real lettering in the end lol...!

Anyway, in spite of all that, it's been coming along! Due to the delays, we're currently floating a potential 2027 release, but I'm hoping that if I finish early that can be scooted forward a bit. Hard to say! Regardless, I hope you'll look forward to it!