What did I do with my weekend? First I had a fabulous Saturday night with Nick F. and SarahScott and her friends Jesse, Adam and Steph, which resulted in a conversation that lasted until 4AM. Love those. Then, on Sunday, I started working on the idea of doing some more character illustrations for my novel, Bones of the Angel.

And here our revels began.

The trouble I'm having is getting my narrator to become a fully-realized character. I know how I want him to grow and change over the course of the story, but I don't really have a good grip on who this guy is yet. Being the largely visual guy I am, I've resorted to doing character sketches and storyboards for parts of the story, to figure out where it slows down and how to get some of these characters to be a little more 3-D. So I broke out some of the comic books I've been reading and started to look for characters that had an element to them that I was looking for. Haven't nailed down the troublesome character yet, but I did come up with a pretty darn good rendition of one of the other main characters, Michael Coldman. Check it out.

The most influential artist du jour was hands down David Finch, who has been doing some amazing pencil work on Ultimate X-Men for the last little while. (Yes, I'm a comic book geek. When you combine passions for the visual arts and storytelling in one head, of course you're going to like comics.) What's interesting is that this is the same character that I previously drew over here. It's remarkable how much one man's art style can evolve over the course of a year – I'm moving away from the more rounded, Disneyfied edges and over towards the more angular, sharp edges of Finch and his lot. It's interesting and exciting, actually – I'm going to try and render all the characters of this story in this maner and post them to that characters page.

Watch this – the problematic Mr. St. John will be the last one up there, I just know it.