DominoDiaries#1

For the last few months any spare time I've been getting I've spent working on another Retrowood story, All Roads lead to Rome.  Consequently, I haven't had much time to do any painting or illustrations, and trying to plan new posts for this blog has pretty much come to a standstill. I've decided the simplest way to remedy that is to simply start posting my progress on the Retrowood story. So what you get for the next several installments is a whole lot more visuals, and a lot less words.

One of the main characters in the story is Domino Mueller, a loose attempt at Marlene Deitrich. Since one of the themes is the masks that we all wear, and screen idols in particular, hence the name Domino, which means mask. This one also features a Fred and Ginger pastiche with Pepper Evans and Devon Ayers.

I think I plotted this one out eight or ten years ago when I was first planning the series, and the thumbnail version I did was actually slated for the first J. Parker Wrighte adventure. But, things change. When I finally got a rough version of the script worked out, I realized that my words would be squeezing a lot of my pictures…so I decided to expand the story from 48 pages to 64. Even though I had a lot of the frames pencilled, it was too difficult a process, since I really added very few additional frames. In most cases, I simply made some of the pictures bigger, and saved any new pictures for where the story really needed the clarity.


These are what the first six pages of thumnails originally looked like

Here is the amended versions stretched to eight pages.

And as a bonus here's a birthday/Christmas painting I did for my lovely wife Annie.