Chapter 2, Milestone 1 reached!

Today I reached my first milestone and finished 20% of the Chapter 2 final artwork. I spent 40 hours working on it. Normally that would have taken me over a month but with my new fulltime schedule I accomplished the first milestone in 1.5 weeks. And that's in fact longer than it should normally take. The finishing touches on the app and the upcoming digitalartconvention in Berlin (which I'm organizing) took away some time from my schedule. However, it feels great to make such fast progress on Chapter 2. I really can't wait to present it to you.

However, the next 4 weeks will hardly see any progress on Chapter 2. It's summer vacation time and my wife and I are looking forward to present little Lucas to his great-grandparents in Spain for the first time. The little rascal is starting to crawl and I'm curious to see his face when he sees a beach for the first time. Then, directly after our vacation there's the digitalartconvention, and in October the Frankfurt Book Fair will take away some days from my schedule, too. I will post details on Frankfurt as soon as I can say when exactly I will be available on the Tokyopop booth.

Well, that all combined leads to the fact that Chapter 2 will presumably not be released so much earlier than originally planned. I really didn't anticipate all the stuff that got in my way and with the app release and the book publishing ahead there's plenty of distraction still waiting for me. I'm planning to continue with Chapter 2 late September and hopefully I'll wrap up the artwork in early November. I don't quite know yet how much time editing and layout will take. For Chapter 1 that process was very tesselated and it's hard to say how long it'll take when I'm working on that part fulltime and in one stretch. There's still a lot to learn for me. I guess, Chapter 3 will be the first Chapter that I will create in a truly proven workflow.

Okay, of course I'm not leaving you without at least a small sneak peek into Chapter 2. Here's a panel from the first milestone that I really enjoyed painting. I was longing to paint forest scenes since the very beginning of my work on the Wormworld Saga and Chapter 2 fortunately has plenty of them: