Every page of Sea Princess Azuri was drawn on 14"x17" smooth bristol (that's a type of really thick paper, so thick a cat can sit on it and not leave wrinkles). As you can see I didn't always have a studio, most of the time I worked on Azuri pages in my bedroom, whether that was a dormroom or my room in my mom's house that she just moved to.

I first ruled out the size of each page with ruler and pencil. I drew at 2X, 2 times the size of print, which means you could take four Azuri books and line 'em up in a rectangle and that's how big the original drawings are.

First the panel and character placement were roughed in using a bluepencil. Those things are great, non-photo blue pencils. They're just the right shade of blue to slip inbetween the blue and green detectors in scanning technology so they basically never show up when scanned. After that I polished off the pencils with a plain old .07 mechanical pencil.

I like to ink with japanese nibs. Specifically I used the G-Pen tip, from Deleter. It's my favorite, it gets a wide range of line variation. I use this with acrylic ink (that's FW brand acrylic ink there, I've since switched to Speedball acrylic ink 'cause it's easier to find) because acrylic ink is sooooooooooooooooo black. Really black. Blacker than sharpie black. Plus it will never pick up with an eraser, the way other inks tend to.


Then it's time to be scanned! I had to get a large format scanner to fit my big pages, it was a hefty investment (my dad helped) but I love that thing to death and it has been so worth it.

I like to do my panel borders on the computer for some reason. Mostly because rulers scare me a little. I'm so afraid of screwing up a straight line. I use photoshop to fix any mistakes in the inks, and they are ready to be toned!



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