It was not a good start, even first half of the week, if I'm going to be brutally honest.

I had a sore throat Sunday evening that turned into a throat infection (and I'm glad it didn't spread because it certainly felt like it would have been a chest infection). It wasn't COVID-19 thank goodness.

I'd also, somehow, properly damaged a muscle on my upper right back near the shoulder (I'm left-handed) and it hurt to take a deep breath or laugh.

Then after coming to terms with the fact I'm going to have to return to part-time employment, a few rejected applications rolled in, and one which was really interested in me (and vice-versa) had a clerical error that meant I'd have a 2hr round trip travelling to the other side of my City instead of just walking for 20 mins. That's fun.

Normally all these alone wouldn't shake me, but with the pandemic hitting my resilience super hard and it all just coming in at once, I just couldn't really cope. It's taken me a bit longer this week to get my pages finished while I just let myself deal with the emotions and get back into the right mindset.

That said - I read Blue in Green and did a few little colour and style experiments using some panel palettes - or some slightly tweaked palettes inspired by a page. They're a little rough but it's all I could manage this week outside of slowly picking away at comic pages.

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Blue in Green is a gorgeous comic with a highly emotive story - its very well deserving of any award it is nominated for or wins. There are more eloquent reviewers who have more to say about it - I was just happy that I figured out most of the workflow required for its style and look by the end of the comic - I was fascinated (and sometimes distracted from the story but that's more on me than on the comic, which is worth a read).

I've been wanting to start bringing more colour into The Final Lullaby from Volume 3 onwards. As much as I loved working in mostly B+W that harkened to my teenage years in manga - I'm just finding the current method of rendering a little tedious and a little limiting these days. So I spent Thursday night just playing with a sketch with different tools as a beginning of where to take the style from now (and then - how to make active magic items stand out again)

I like the middle one but I'll probably have that same issue with limited colour - so I'm thinking to trying to combo the middle and right hand - using a quirky little two-tone pen I found on CLIP ASSETS (one of them modified to be a bit more g-nib like) - but I still have a few lines to go down - I love brush pens, but I guess I'm after something a little more firm for line art - so if I get a chance I wanna try using a g-pen like nib for lines. I would like to keep it somewhat simple and speedy since I'm a sole creator so I guess more play will be the name of the game!