Furlough 3 – making the first page
From when I first started thumbnailing Furlough 3, I knew I wanted the first page to be a single large image, a pinup in a way I hadn’t really worked with before. My artistic tradition started with drawing in the margins of notes in class, so drawing larger has been intimidating to me. I’m getting over it, fortunately.
In ways, the making of this cover is much like the way I drafted the rest of the book. Thumbnail in pencil, light sketch in blue pencil (a nearly devoured nub of a thing whose brand was sharpened away sometime in the last month), a more solid sketch in blue pencil (Turquoise Prismacolor drawing leads in a Koh-I-Noor Technigraph lead holder, HB but feels harder, so it makes me make more defined lines when I use it), and finally the inked drawing itself, done on fresh bristol over a light table.
The rest of the book is ink right on top of my penciled photo-blue lines, but page one and the covers, I did with the light table.
So here’s my rough sketch, based on the thumbnail I drew back in November or so.

Unlike some other pages, this image doesn’t date to when I originally wrote the script in late 2009, but it’s been pretty solid and consistent since I started editing the script for this issue.
Here’s the first, rougher pencil.

I darkened it in Photoshop so you could see what the hell I was talking about, but in person, it’s definitely lighter than pencil two.

As you can see, it’s much much tighter. I did take a photo reference for this, which I am not posting. No no no. It was really helpful, though – I would’ve never guessed that the center of the ribcage would stick out like that when someone was in this position. It also made me miss figure drawing, which I need to get back into. It helped when I was drawing this issue, and I didn’t go nearly as many times as I’d have liked.
I did two inked versions of this. The first had some freakish head stuff going on, and I messed up the couch cushions, so it is currently in my building’s recycling bin. This one is delightfully less mutated. Here, I’ve added the email screenshot inset and the lettering.

Rather lovely, no? I’m really happy with how it came out. It feels like the culmination of a solid month-plus spent drawing and doing little else. I inked with Higgins Black Magic Waterproof Ink (I’ve tried others and always wound up pissed off or disappointed), a Hunt 102 nib, and the larger silver kind that isn’t an A, B, or C something or other. I just tried to Google it and had no luck, so I’m just going to hope you know what I’m talking about.
So that’s page one. There are 35 others in Furlough 3, which is going to be an actual, physical object by Friday, which you can buy from me this weekend at the Emerald City Comicon. (Table M-27! Stop by! Bring friends!)
This week will be another mad rush of preparing, but after the slog of finishing this comic (which concluded with an 18-hour spree of page completion, lettering, and questioning the value of human life), it all seems like the easiest cake that ever did cake.














