HANA PART 2: Five alive

It's been a while, so let's catch the hell up. Sorry about the technical difficulties. My mouse wheel died so that it eternall scrolled downwards. In Photoshop this meant that any picture I was working on was zoomed out until it was little more than a speck in the distance.

Then while trying to fix my mouse, I managed to pour water all over the left side of my keyboard. For some reason, it took about 3 days before none of the keys on the left hand side refused to work.

Weird.

Anyway, back to Hana. This is an interesting page. It's all smoke and mirrors, and everything I've drawn you don't actually get to see!

As you can see, the top page is actually fairly detailed. I put a significant amount of work into the background. I think it's because I knew that the rest of the page would be all cutting corners.

I quite like the top panel, I like Hana's expression. It speaks of a subtle trepidation. While I think it's a decent likeness, it's hard to create an exact image of someone when you can't see their hair! One of things I did with the Zero G outfits was to make sure that you could see everyone's hair and tell everyone apart at a glance. You will also notice that she has a Chinese flag on her arm. I was tempted to do the Israel flag, but I had a look back at the story itself. I got the impression that Hana's plan had been executed no more than 5 minutes before she was captured - perhaps even as she contemplated the rocket. If she'd thought that far ahead she could have forged the documents in their system well beforehand and walked onto the base as an honoured guest. As it was, there's no way they would have had the time to sew an Israeli patch onto the astronaut suit.

This second panel could have been so much more beautiful and epic. I'm not sure what got lost. Perhaps the scale? Some trucks or people in the foreground would have really helped the scale of it. As it is, it looks a bit like a Thunderbirds mission.

The final panel is just so simple. A mediocre likeness at best. About the only thing the page has going for it is that at least she looks Israeli. The data streaming in was an afterthought after I had drawn page 6.

In other news: I finished another Emperor and the Concubine page. It's so hard to go back to this style. I'm going to make this Heroes style, my new visual style. It's so fast and effective. I can't wait to see Annette colour some of this stuff. I'm still burnt out from Heroes, and work has been relentless. I'm hoping that next week is the light at the end of the tunnel.