Page 33 Completed: Betty Burro Climbs to the Top and Feels That Buddy Has Not Been a True Friend

I used Photoshop to generate this CMYK image.

This week I completed pages 32 and 33. I was hoping to complete three pages, but it wasn’t in the cards. It turns out that the most complex part of creating a page is the background, not the characters. Backgrounds become complicated and time-consuming when they show lots of details such as stones, rocks, unusual perspectives, and foliage. The more details in the background, the longer a picture takes.

In a typical comic book of about 25 pages each page has about six images…about 150 in all. It’s clear why comic artists leave out backgrounds. A picture book, on the other hand has about 40 large images that will be printed at 300 dpi. The charm of picture books is that the images can be detailed enough to create an immersive experience.