meeting characters and finishing them off

I've been working very busily on Le Book, and have completed quite a few pages this past week in particular (there will be almost 100). In creating my very first self-illustrated book, there's been two lovely things that have taken me by surprise--two things I very much love to do.

The first thing is meeting the characters visually. I'm so used to meeting characters in text. Sure, you envisage them in your head, absolutely--but to see them appear from the tip of a fineliner or paint brush--it's just a lovely, unexpected surprise. I often have no idea who will appear until I get to work.

The other thing I'm loving--and this comes as no surprise, as I'm an editor at heart--is the finishing. I'm hand-rendering most of this book in watercolour and fineliner, but I'm also digitising the artworks and creating full pages, touching up and correcting the hand-rendered works as I go.

This is a good, good thing for someone as impatient and imprecise as me! I find it astonishing that anyone could produce a completely finished artwork by hand--I bow down before you if you can do this. My style is just too loose and un-trained to operate with such finesse, so I give thanks to the Computer Software Gods for handing me the tools to polish up my mistakes! And, of course, being able to move objects around, play with them and see where they sit best--heaven heaven heaven.

Off to draw some bees, and who knows what they'll look like--I'll soon find out!