Update 03/08/15

Hello everyone... hope you all had a nice unplanned four-day weekend.  I think it's time for a brief update! I'm nearly finished all of my backgrounds for the cartoon. They required quite a bit of precision, as demonstrated by the picture below. I had to use a ruler to draw the buildings of the city in this scene.

This next picture includes a mostly colored version of the same background.

I'm using PIGMA SENSEI manga-drawing utensils (not sure if they are considered pens or markers), Fibracolor markers, and some generic color pencils. I did just buy a pack of new color pencils... the green ones are running out fast.

If you've been following my blog, you probably remember this boy. For several plot reasons, I flipped him around digitally. After printing him out, I colored him using Fibracolor markers. I will cut him out later.

Here are some more character designs. Notice the remarkable changes occurring at the top of the paper. I'm not sure how I got from point A to point B...

The whole cartoon will follow the "journey" of a single hot air balloon. I have some preliminary designs for it directly below, as well as another character design.

The following is a drawing of the balloon that I scanned and made a digital copy of. I used a kind of cross-hatching technique to emulate shading and lighting.

After printing the balloon out twice, I colored both but varied the shape of the mouth (open or closed). I will add googly eyes, too (this may turn out to look pleasant or creepy... I sure hope it's not the latter). 

That's about it for this update. There's much more to come in the video blog (which will be edited and uploaded by tomorrow evening) and the next official blog post.