[ (08/11/2025) Number 97 in the 'over 2000 views club']
Those of you who watch  Lei-Lani may have noticed a journal awhile back announcing a comic project I proposed doing.
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I've been a bit quiet on that since then other than an entry on my art-activity journal, but this pic is my up-front acknowledgement that I have indeed added this project to my repetoire.

Oh, and this image marks the 700th pic I've posted to FA (and just by coincidence, just before 7:00pm on the posting date)

The two principal characters you see here--Lei-lani, of course, and my first male character Roland, who goes back to 1987-ish and is long overdue for some character development that doesn't take place exclusively inside my head :D

Now, I had to do some serious handle-cranking on "The Contrivance Machine" to get him in this situation, since he's not the kind to consider a tropical paradise to be the first pick for a vacation prize. But he's wound up here for a spell, and he's at a complete loss as to how to have fun here. The lack of a certain skill only compounds his difficulty...until his path crosses with that of one uniquely qualified to address that shortcoming. By the way, the effects of some events transpiring in this comic will also become part of his canon.

Those who know Lei-Lani already have a good idea of what sort of things are likely to happen, but in my continuing quest for plausibility, will be taking a bit of an indirect path to get there. As such, I don't know how many pages this will end up being, so the plan is to plot the sequence of events to a suitable location to pause the story, then go back and pencil/ink/color the relevant pages for posting, then resume development in parallel with...the other stuff I'd be doing in the meantime :)

Yes, this is uncharted territory for my work, and I'm already learning some new things with just this pic, namely the underwater lighting effects. Needless to say, I'm also reviewing the extensive body of work written and drawn of Lei-Lani so my depiction of the character is as accurate as possible.

Technical: Much of this artwork was done during my subway commute home from work over the course of several days (this includes concept sketches which may also be posted). The sinuous pose of Lei-Lani here was no exception, which is noteworthy because it's also the first time I've drawn a character with such an extreme heads-up pose. It came out so well that I wasn't willing to risk re-drawing it on a fresh sheet of paper and instead light-boxed* it onto a new sheet of bristol. Roland was also done on a separate sheet. The plan here was to vector-trace both pics in Inkscape, then combine and re-size them at the proper relative sizes to evoke a look like that of the original movie posters for JAWS. From there it was back to my trusty old MPP for color and effects, including a tactic I'd never used before to produce the curtains of light underwater. It was literally a cloud texture stretched, perspective-shifted and pasted in as a semi-transparent pane in front of the turquoise water, a technique for Photoshop that I learned from YouTube that I never imagined being able to accomplish with this ancient (late 1990's) application. But there you are :)

Pencil on bristol, lower 2/3 lightboxed then vector inked in Inkscape, colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Fourteen layers, 239MB in MPP's native format.

Oh yeah, 700th upload :D

*(look up "AGPtek Light Pad" on Amazon if you're in the market for one of these)

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