Heres another one, theres not too much to do on this one. Looking forward to getting started.

Playing around with the silver markers made me want to add a third color, but I'm going to resist because metallics are expensive to print and that wasn't part of my original plan. If someone else was paying for the printing I'd put it in, but they're not so I won't.

More tomorrow.

This is a scan of my pdf print with the pinstriping and flames drawn in with red and silver marker, all ready for illustrator and the final decoration phase (starting monday).

Fairly rough, I'll be more careful when I start to lay out the shapes to make it more graceful, trying to make it look like it was done with a sword brush.

Three days left.

I'm setting myself a fairly relaxed workload for the weekend, because I'm burned out. Anyway, this weekend is the Turkish Grand Prix, which I'm hugely looking forward to since its the first race back after F1's summer break.

I've already marked out the flames and pinstripes on a new small scale print of the book taken from a near final pdf I generated yesterday. I'll scan this in today and tomorrow and be ready to go on Monday morning with the final stage of decoration.

I've been having a blast with this project, its got everything I love. Racing cars and hell and the devil and flames and crashes, oh my.

More later, I'll post some of the scans to show you what I have in mind for the decoration.

Okay, thats all she wrote for now. Tonight I'll start to workout the flames etc, decoration and all that. The second and second last pages are a simulated dustjacket, which I like to do. Anything possible to make it seem as real as possible.

My girlfriend is going to help me edit over the weekend so hopefully everything will be finished on time early next week. Kind of happy, kicking back for a while, play some rounds of poker.

Okay, so thats it then. I have four days left to decorate, of which I'll take one day off. I'm working on the pinstriping now using pencil and markers on a small black and white print of the spreads.

Four days left.

I'm going through the final few tweeks on the images. Nearly everything is drawn. Now its time to decorate. Theres so much of this to do that I'm not sure how long this might take.

Anyway, thats neither here nor there. I'll be posting small images of all the unadorned pages later on.

More later...

Hopefully the last scan I'll have to do, I know I've just cursed myself on that btw.

Okay, with five days to go I'm starting later than I'd like today. Real work kind of got in the way.

I made a new list of everything that still needs to be drawn last night and its a lot shorter than the list I made on Monday, so progress is being made.

I'll post every page sans verses as soon as the last few are corrected, that should be the last step before the pinstriping begins.

More later.

Five days left.

I was so down on Monday when I put together my first list of corrections, it was huge and it seemed like it might take days. Long story short, its almost done, maybe about a day left adding one or two elements that I've consistantly forgotten throughout the process.

Once the major stuff is drawn I'll start to build myself a pinstripe library that I can place as I like on the pages.

I spent last evening going over a very small print out of the book with a red marker to indicate where the pinstripe is going to end up, I'm really looking forward to getting started on that as soon as I can.

More later, I hope.

This is a scan of a portion of a work sheet, one of my large scale prints. I just wanted to get the decoration kind of sketched in, so I used a silver marker to just do a quick sketch. The drawing at the bottom is my revised composition. This is the last page that hasn't in some way been locked down yet, its still very much in flux.

I'm trying to finish all the cars today along with all the devil's poses. I'll do Jimmy Boy tomorrow...fingers crossed.

Its coming up on 3 o'clock. I'm working on the charactar poses, just trying to knock some stuff off my list.

This is a pose thats been worked out on its own sheet.

More on that later.

Getting lots done. Its coming up on 1 o'clock and I'm just scanning and fixing.

The image is just a simple three step look at how I put together the charactar stuff. The only thing not included is the scan of the ink rough that was done.

This is my first attempt at pinstriping, its for the inside cover of the book.

Things are going better today, getting a lot done and its only 11am.

Six days left.

I had a really bad day yesterday. I made lists of corrections, finishes etc. It was horrible, theres just too much to do. I barely posted anything yesterday, there just wasn't much point. It was a couple of lines here and a fix there all day long. I gave up at about 5pm and went for a few games of Full Tilt, where I had about as much luck.

Anyway, I feel better today and have just decided to forget about the pinstriping for now. I need to get the book illustrated and then worry about the final layer of decoration.

So thats it, I have six days left, and then I'll start to work on pinstriping. Its just too delicate to learn in 28 days, and its kind of stuipid for me to believe that I could pick it up so quickly.

I'll post some of the early attempts at pinstriping later, but for now I have a few more corrections and additions to do.

More later.

This is a 2 color piece for the cover of my last project. Did it yesterday, just got a bunch of notes and corrections from my brother.

The colors are black (obviously) and Pantone 143C

Now back to work on Highway666...

I started building brushes in Illustrator to start at least playing with pinstriping. I made calligraphic brushes with variations based on heading to give it that 'sword brush' kind of look.

I'll post some stuff later when I can get blogger to upload.

Seven days left

I tried to upload to blogger this morning but no joy.

Last night I started to scribble on my large scale prints, marking out corrections, playing with the pinstriping and drawing in details. Too much work to even think about, I'll need to start making lists which I'll gradually scratch out as the pages are completed.

More later...

Eight days left.

I prepared a medium resolution pdf for the the book that I'm going to print this morning. I'll start scribbling on the print and making lists of all the fixes/clean-ups and sketches required to finish the book on time.

I'm looking forward to seeing it printed all big, it makes a huge difference to have something that size to work with. More about that later.

This is a page of scans for the last spread in the book, I'll work on this later too.

I'm still trying to figure out if I should use a checker flag or just a white line or maybe a finish post to represent the end. I'm sure it's going to work itself out.

I just found this over at Cartoon Modern and its so good I had to share. They're stills from a 1958 Italian Petrol Association TV commercial.

I just set it as my new desktop, I'm really loving it.

Click through for a sizeable jpeg...

Nine days left.

Its a Sunday, not much going on. I started to look at the entire document today and then just go through each page and tweak or add just enough to move everything forward.

Still trying to design Bedlam, still got to do a couple more car drawings, still got to do a lot of clean-up and I still have a lot of charactar stuff to draw.

Still, I have to say that its mostly looking good and its almost ready for its first near full size print. I have access to a 50k Xerox with a Fiery front end which makes running tests very easy. The Fiery handles spot color matching and its pdf integration means that its very easy to compile and tranfer files. Once the large prints are done then I'll draw over then with black red and silver markers (one for each print color and silver to simulate white for the underlying paper) and start to finalize some images.

Thats for tomorrow, today I just posed the Lotus25 for the last time (I think).

The difference between the two renders is kind of subtle, but one was taken from an orthographic camera and deformed with a lattice while the other was taken from a perspective veiw and has no deformations applied. The idea behind them both is the same, to try to create something that is more graphic for the final page, not sure exactly which direction it might go yet.

More on that tomorrow.