YIH Ch 8 Cover + Chapter progress breakdown

There's the progress for the cover artwork. Below here will be a big blurb about how much time Chapter 8 took to make, and about things that made my work a lot easier this time round.

(And nope, no more pages, I've been careful to pick the pages that wouldn't spoil too much, and that's how much I dared to put in)

How long did the artwork take to make?

Because the chapter wasn't longer than 30 pages, I managed to do each phase at once. In other words I sketched absolutely everything before inking or colouring.
If there would've been 50 pages for example, I'd sketch about 50%, finish the artwork, then sketch the remaining 50% and finish the rest, just so that I wouldn't get bored.

This was the first time I used the technique to include grayscale values in sketches. First I thought it was gonna be too time consuming and annoying to do, but after realizing how much easier it made the work afterwards, I've sticked with this technique. It makes the sketches so much easier to read and it's easier to evaluate the balance of compositions, and just for the exchange of little discipline.

And in reality, the grayscaling doesn't take a long time at all, it's about 3-6 minutes of extra time to work on a sketch per page, that might save me 30-60 minutes in lineart.

Started sketches on the 17th of January, finished 30th.

Artwork in itself took from 1/February  - 27/April, so I averaged finishing 2-3 pages per week.
Could've made more, but I had a lot of commissioned work to do and I overtimed those quite a bit. Weekends were my prime time to get YIH done.


Overall, probably the best progress I've ever made, and I actually started to write down these kinds of details. Diaries, if you will. I think it will really help reflect on these things in the future.

- Mika