Hindsight

At one point I was thinking about setting Romeo & Juliet in the Harlem Renaissance, and I watched some fun documentaries about it. I had a lot of fun sketching some of the great lindy routines they were doing in the dance scenes.

I did a short interview with the fabulous Jenn Dowell at Audiofile magazine, and I’m featured in a very brief spot in the October issue.

In preparation I looked up what audiobooks I listened to for the 14 months I was working on Romeo & Juliet (previously: what I was listening to while drawing The Odyssey). Here they are, in no particular order:

11-22-63 (Stephen King) – good, but WAY too long.
A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula LeGuin) – still great, but too short.
Out of the Silent Planet (C.S. Lewis) – still fun, but WAY too short.
Apprentice Adept (Piers Anthony) – I’ve long since outgrown his writing, but this series is still fun and I think it’s high time we made “The Game” in real life. Who’s with me?
SEAL team Six (Howard Wasdin) – I don’t quite know what possessed me to read this. It’s not bad, but pretty much just what you’d expect.
Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) – good, but repetitive. Needed better editing. The ubiquitous cover photo has caused numerous people to tell me I look like Steve Jobs.
Ready Player One (Ernest Cline, read by Will Wheaton) – fantastic! The perfect audiobook, at least for a child of the ’80s.
Divergent (Veronica Roth) – at times I enjoyed this, but found it ultimately unconvincing, and I have a pretty strong feeling “the intellectuals are the bad guys” is not just a convenient plot device, it’s something she believes.
David Copperfield (Dickens) – couldn’t finish. It was bad enough when the protagonist was a non-character, but when he turned into a debauched twerp I couldn’t take it any more.
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson) – holy exposition Batman! Couldn’t finish. Tried the film, and still don’t understand why so many people like it. I found it to be a weak mystery with weak writing and chockablock with horrible gratuitous unpleasantness.
Winter’s Tale (Mark Helprin) – pretty interesting, but I couldn’t finish. I think the reader killed it for me.
The Bluest Eye (Tony Morrison) – brilliant, and oh so unpleasant.
The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) – ditto, but in a different way.
A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) – even more depressing.
Snuff (Terry Pratchett) – not his best, but quite good.
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorn) – I enjoyed this way more than I was expecting based on my very vague memories of it.
Soon I Will Be Invincible (Austin Grossman) – I enjoyed this more in print, I think. The readers are mediocre.
The Ring of Solomon (Jonathan Stroud) – Awesome, awesome, awesome.
The Wake of the Lorelei Lee (L.A. Meyer) – as with the rest of the series, highly enjoyable, thanks mostly to the fabulous reading of Katherine Kellgren.
Three Cups of Tea (Greg Mortenson) – good.
Better (Atul Gawande) – Complications was better than Better. I was hoping for more insight on how surgeons stay on the top of their game, especially with the long hours that seem to come with that job.

…
and of course my favorite audio series, which I constantly revisit, Sherlock Holmes.

I haven’t been posting much as I have my nose to the grindstone coloring Romeo & Juliet. But for some reason this partially colored page demanded to be scanned and posted.

(Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio on their way to the party at the Capulet mansion, just after the Queen Mab speech.)

Here’s a little holiday present: my first making-of video for Romeo & Juliet, showing how I inked the double-page party spread using Manga Studio.

There was an export problem I couldn’t figure out how to fix, so the audio is a little out of sync at the end.

Warm holiday wishes to everyone!

I thought it would be interesting to see if sculpting a few of my main characters in 3D would improve my ability to draw their likeness easily and consistently. I built a low-poly 3D base head and used Mudbox to sculpt the details. Obviously I didn’t take it to a fully-finished level, especially the hair, but this is more or less what Romeo looks like.

The jury’s still out on whether this was useful or not, but it was kind of fun anyway, and makes me feel just a little less out of the loop as far as 3D graphics.

Section of coffered barrel vault celing I’m working on for the party scene in Romeo & Juliet: