Fables for Japan

Hello people. The following is all work on an anthology project I'm participating in to assist those affected by the disaster in Japan called "Fables for Japan". The book will consist of drawings, comics, and stories based or inspired by Japanese fairy tales. The book will be released digitally in three parts over the course of the year and solidly after that. For more information you can check out the project's facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fables-for-Japan/169318336462463?sk=wall

The comic I've created is about a mortally wounded samurai and his encounters with different creatures in an enchanted forest. Below you can see my initial character design and color study for the protagonist samurai.

When I first started working on the project, I had thought about using watercolors and inks, but because I haven't had enough practice with it, and a tight deadline, I decided against throwing a lot of time into something that may not work. Below is one of the tests I did in watercolor and ink on the demon character.
Here's the digitally colored version. The final comic will probably have some traditional elements textured in so it has a more natural look but for the purpose of a study I was happy with this.
Below is a sketch of the first page in the five page story. This was part of the series of sketches (along with the character designs and script) that I turned into Jason Minor (the project leader) for consideration. While I see the value in planning and sketching out scenes, I must admit I'm not a big fan of doing really elaborate sketches (and yes, for me this is an elaborate planning sketch). I like to use sketching to place my characters and do a bit of composition work but I usually just do it with a stick figure and a few lines. Working as a part of someone else's project however, it was important to have legible and cohesive sketches so I took them a bit further than I normally would. In my next post i'll put up the final sketches I did for myself so you can see how primitive they are (they're in ball point pen so they don't scan very well but whatever).
After reviewing the email packet I sent, Jason has some great ideas which I happily took. After doing the aforementioned ball point penned planning I got to work on the actually pages. Below is the final inked first page awaiting coloring. So far I've penciled in 3.3/5 pages and inked the one. It's not unsual for me to ink in a page or two even before I finished penciling. Probably not the best practice but I can't help myself. enjoy and please check out the project on Facebook and if you follow for continuous updates and other artist's work.