By Monday, I had worked well and had a surfeit of seventeen 3rd Blade strips, meaning I could devote the next month to the Sixsmiths. A month should be enough to get me within shouting distance of the finish line. To date I have drawn some 35 pages of the book, and the total will be about 100. I do not know the exact numbers because not all of the scripts have been written yet, and we keep adding short 1-3 page webcomics to the book. It's a bit of an organic beast, this one. Just last week we decided on a different ending than we had origiinally planned

I got out of bed relatively late after a fair night's sleep. After breakfast I got to work on some Sixsmiths webcomics that I had to finish. This entailed pencilling three panels, and inking eight. I had finished by 11am or so. The Sixsmiths webcomic is now fully drawn until September, just like 3rd Blade.

After that, I went on the internet to check my e-mail. While on my computer, I also re-organised my 'Sixsmiths' folder and put it onto my 'desktop' for easy access. I found I have 5 scripts that need to be drawn, and 4 more are yet to be written. I will write the script for episode 11, Jason will take care of the rest. 4 have already been drawn, 9 remain. There are 13 episodes all together. I have drawn episodes 1, 2, 4, and 5, as well as some shorter stories for the webcomic which will also be seen in the book.

In the afternoon it was hot. I laid out the story which appears earliest in the narrative; episode 3, 'Training Day'. This script was written by Jason, and runs six pages. The first page requires some details of a train, and after laying out the first page I decided it would do better with 2 pages, because the panels were too small for what I needed to show, i.e. lots of characters sitting on a train. I did something similar at the end of the story. In the script, the last two pages are set on the train. I've extended those two pages to three. This means the script is now 8 pages.

I went to the gym, and when I came home I prepared dinner. After dinner I worked for a further 2 hours or so, laying out the rest of the story. It is now laid out quite well. I think I can get most of the pencilling done for it tomorrow.

Jason's scripts are often quite 'filmic' and hard to get onto the page. Sometimes he has a great sense of motion, but other times I think he tries to put too much onto a page, or imagines his framing in a way which can be very tricky to draw. His webcomic scripts, which are comedies, (unlike 'Training Day' which is a straightforward yarn) are almost always very simple to put in comics form. Perhaps he has a better feel of writing comedy for comics than drama?

Tonight I was excited for some reason after my 2 hours of drawing, so I went for a walk to burn off some of that.

Here is my original 'thumbnail' of page 1, which is a 7-paneller. More than six panels is tricky, especially if any of the panels need a lot of detail, as several of these ones do.

Here's a version I started pencilling on my art paper. Panels 1, 2 and 4 need more detail than others. I decided I would just spread the seven panels out over two pages. A shame; as I rather like panel 2! 

Here is the 2-page version. Two pages may seem like it means more work, but I find large panels take about as long to draw as small ones, especially when there is a lot of detail on them.   

See you next time. I have to get back to work!