Turja is the queen of Zidnor and sarcasm. :)

This page introduces another member of the royal family, Lord Shiki. He's known primarily as the right-hand man to Turja's uncle Hul, with whom she has deep philosophical differences.

Whereas the first Lizard Queen Chronicles page took me so long because I thought so much about stylistic choices I had to make and used techniques that unnecessarily slowed me down, this one took me so long largely because I procrastinated so much before I started it.

I applied a few lessons I learned from the first page. I originally did two levels of shading, but I found that when I shrunk the page down to its final size, the second level of shading essentially vanished. So now I just do one level of shading. It's easier and saves time. I also tried to make the shaded colors more distinct from the base colors, because some viewers reported having trouble seeing the shading.

I also tweaked the colors in other ways. For example, I used a lighter shade of gold, because the one I was using on the previous page is ugly as hell.

And since inking digitally took me an eternity last time, I inked most of this page traditionally. I only used the computer for most of the straight lines. I found that the Uni-ball Jetstream pens (1.0 mm) I bought for writing checks and stuff are actually pretty awesome for inking small detail areas.

I made a separate layer for the background shadows. On page 1, I used Paint Shop Pro's "Lightness Down" retouching brush and scribbled over the backgrounds, almost ruining them. On page 2, the shadows look a lot smoother.

I'm not sure I like the tall, narrow shape of Shiki's second word bubble, or the way it overlaps the previous panel, but I couldn't figure out any other way to place it without obscuring the engraving over Turja's throne to which Shiki is referring.

Tell me what you think!