It seems like all the time I see blogs with just lovely process documentation. Inspiring stuff, a welcome look behind the finished work. And I think to myself, “Why don’t you ever share that kind of thing, huh? What are you, chicken? Chicken?”

But that’s not it at all, that’s just me being an jerk.

The thing is, when I’m working on the book, almost everything in my sketchbook is an incomprehensible mess, visually illegible, often even to myself. Every once in a while maybe I could post something like this thumbnail for the cover for RHO #3.

“Well, hey, that’s pretty cool,” you say, “Why not post thumbnails, those are interesting.”

Here’s the thing, though. That thumbnail was specifically drawn to share. My working thumbnails look more like this:

And that’s a nice one. It’s got little annotations, shading indications, and is relatively organized.

This is more typical. It’s got an itty-bitty panel layout, some numbered panels, group compositions scattered about, and essentially indistinguishable figures.

This is…what is this I don’t even. It’s thumbnails for three pages, one of which might be misnumbered. I… I don’t even know if all of the panels are on there; I may have left some in my head. If they are there, they aren’t labeled in any way.

Character/creature/prop design pages tend to be much neater. The thing with posting characters, which really only applies to this project, is that if you see them here, you aren’t surprised to find them in the book. I imagine that’s part of the fun of RHO, seeing what characters from Oz show up, and what they’re like in this interpretation. So while this sort of material is more presentable, it shouldn’t necessarily be presented, you know? Spoiler alerts and all that. On the other hand, do people look for this kind of material and not expect some sort of sneak peak? I would think that’s the appeal in the first place. It is a conundrum, is what I’m getting at.

So in summary and in conclusion, most things are messy and you probably don’t want to see them anyway.