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Work continues on Page 13 of The Realm Ethereal: The Sky Dreamers, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to share both the finished pencils and the current inking progress.
The pencil stage is where all the pieces of the page finally come together. The composition and storytelling were established earlier in my thumbnails, but here I can work out the characters, expressions, anatomy, backgrounds and smaller details that will eventually make their way into the finished artwork.
With a page like this, there’s quite a bit happening visually, so the pencils become my roadmap for the next stage.
Once I begin inking, the personality of the finished page really starts to emerge.
I’m gradually working my way through the drawing, establishing line weights, textures, shadows and areas of solid black. You can see the contrast between the two images—the pencil drawing contains all the information, but the inks begin creating the depth, focus and visual energy I want in the final artwork.
There’s still plenty left to ink, particularly in that large foreground figure!
Story-wise, Page 13 also brings us to an interesting point in The Sky Dreamers.
We’re about to transition back to the confrontation between Om and Kor that took place in The Dream Awakens. We’ve seen pieces of that battle before, but as The Sky Dreamers continues to explore the past, we may discover there was more to that encounter than what we originally witnessed.
For now, it’s back to the drawing board—quite literally.
More progress on Page 13 soon.
