I continued to experiment with the shaman character using brush pens, ink, and fine liners, below is the result

I really liked the image on the left but felt it was too religious and I wanted to make it even goofier, I realized my illustrations needed color for this spread so began introducing some greens, I really liked the two-tone contrast and had a stylistic vision for this spread based on the work of comic artist and writer Mike Mignola, best known for creating Hellboy

I felt I was getting the heavy black space right but wanted to introduce some more harsh tone variation, rather than relying on cross-hatch shading I opted for a blocky two-tone style

Above is the final sketch for this spread, I really liked the composition and use of color, I also liked the close-up image of the face as this helped compositionally as well as helping establish the character in a more detailed and recognizable setting. I took a lot of inspiration from my portraits and used a lot more tone variation than I usually would, I think this helps tie two very different illustration styles together, as the prior pages were a lot less fantastical or zainy. I liked everything about this illustration apart from the football head that I managed to mess up, I wanted to render this in a more polished way so used my graphics tablet to do so, I really liked the roughness of the pen so wanted to use texture brushes and some rough shading to keep its feel.

I think the changes I made were very successful and I would like to try printing this illustration in the future.

The narrative behind this page is that people aren’t always what you want or expect them to be, the shaman turns out to just be a man that likes to live in the forest, he wears a funny hat and sits in his favorite spot and talks to the people that pass him by, he’s at peace but he isn’t a spiritual leader of mystic character, just a man in a funny hat.

He tells the detective “I’m not a shaman, a spirit guide or a master, I just like frogs. Years ago I gave you my Frognifying glass, I told you that I hope it would help you find meaning. It’s not magic, I just saw you were feeling lost and wanted to give you something to mark a change in your life, something to inspire you… Don’t look for meaning in everything and anything, let meaning find you, all these objects you prescribe meaning onto, don’t help you find some great truth, just enjoy yourself and find a nice hill to sit on.”