Behind the scenes: The last page

In-progress photo of colours being built-up on the clouds and sky - yellows, pale oranges, bright blues and muted purples — Painting the last page

As mentioned in “The colours of Now Recharging”, one of the few full colour pages in Now Recharging is the last page. Not the actual last page story-wise, mind you, but the last page I finished painting: the sunset from Chapter 11 page 70. The colours are based on some photos I captured on a family trip to Edmonton, Alberta a few years ago:

Purple, pink, orange, gold clouds over Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, framed by the dark silhouettes of tree branches and buildings

Working on this was a strange feeling… a kind of bittersweet nostalgia as I was right in the middle of it.

For this page, I used not only the usual Daniel Smith 3-colour palette, but also Peerless watercolour sheets and Sakura Petite Color gansai watercolours (a portable traveling set). Here are some process photos as I built up the layers of colour.

In-progress photo 1 of comic page with inked text boxes and sketch drawing — Light washes of colour on the faintly sketched drawing: pale purple, blue, orange and yellow

In-progress photo 2 with hand holding a brush over the comic page — Building up the layers of purple on the clouds

In-progress photo 3 with cleaning tissue and palette next to the comic page, and a hand holding a brush over it — Working my way down the page and adding more detail and shadows

In-progress photo 4 with paint palette next to the comic page, and a hand holding a brush over it — Working my way across the page to the bottom right corner with Mx. Zhou and the gladiatorbots and laundrybots

As I paint, I clean the brush on a tissue, so it starts to pick up the palette of the page. So this tissue has all the colours of this page on it!

Photo of ceramic cup with water coloured brown from many different paint colours; tissue paper dotted with a rainbow of assorted colours; and a slim #2 watercolour brush

Some news: Now Recharging Books 4 and 5 (digital ebooks) are now available in my Ko-fi and itch.io shops! Super-exciting! Here’s a look at all five covers together:

Collage of all covers of Now Recharging Books 1-5 by Maiji/Mary Huang. Text reads: Emmie is an android who loves sheep, is bad at math, and worries about nonexistence. Designed to learn naturally with no apparent end application, they do their best to navigate the ups, downs and wonders of life, from laundry and job hunting to pondering one’s purpose and place. Even the ordinary is an adventure! NowRecharging.com Ebooks available at ko-fi.com/maiji/shop & maiji.itch.io

Also, I made a minor edit to Book 3 yesterday. I just noticed that one of the page numbers near the end of the book was on the wrong side. There’s no real difference in the content otherwise, though it’s a bit larger in file size for some reason (my guess is software updates since the time I originally exported the file). If you already bought Book 3 before and want the update, and for some reason can’t download the new file, contact me through the site you ordered from with your order confirmation info and I’ll send you a new download link for version r(evision) 2!

Last but not least, I’ve made some updates to the Characters page – including adding pronunciation reference links. Now you actually get to see what some of the names are in terms of the base Chinese characters!

♥ Maiji (Aug 8, 2022)

See entire chapter: Behind the Scenes