Yay! Ryke is back! Well…not yet, but at least he was mentioned.

I actually debated with myself all the way up until drawing this page this week whether or not I should keep Ryke. Er…what I mean by that is whether or not he would stay in the chapter. I very seriously considered just having him give the bandits a map or directions to the carpentry and then saying “toodles!” But after thinking it over I decided that I could use him effectively in this chapter.

Let’s dive into the art of this page, cause I actually have some stuff to say about that.

First off, my bad on the top two panels. I didn’t realize I was shading on a textured surface till those were finished, so they have some weird subtle texture to them. ^^;
Also in the top right panel, Ryke’s eyes (in my opinion) came out terrible! D:< I almost inked over them, but was afraid it would just look sloppy... The two other Ryke panels, I like. I think they have some fun detail and an easily distinguishable character. And then that leaves us with the other two... I'm gonna go ahead and say it up front: I really like both! HOWEVER! I think the bottom one does a better job of separating the characters from each other and the background. I feel that one of the differences between the two panels is that the top one has about the same amount of small details on the characters and the background, while the bottom one has less small details on the characters (mostly because they are closer) and more details in the background. I tend to get pretty line heavy in my background details, so I hope to counteract this by drawing less small details on characters in front of detailed backgrounds. Maybe that'll fix it (or maybe it won't!) xD On the whole page, I really tried to build the backgrounds around the characters. Some lines halt before touching the characters or just help accent the character. I really like this idea (even if I didn’t pull it off very well on this page), but I hope to make backgrounds more like that in the future.

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