Merry Christmas! I had a lot of fun making this one. Watercolor on Strathmore 400 mixed media paper. I've learned so much about art this year - how to consider lighting, how to take photo reference, hot to pick color palettes, how to better utilize watercolors...I really feel like I'm leveling up!

I admit that I haven't been giving this website the attention it needs in the past year, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working on Black Ball! Right now, I have about 28 pages of storyboards that I've been sitting on, that I'm now diving into roughs and pencils for! I started doing this part of the process digitally, with the intention to ink digitally and then color by hand still. I just have to save up for a printer...that's neither here nor there.

This has been a pretty wild year. If you'd like to hear all about that, I have a bunch of posts on my Substack that have detailed my unemployment, a family medical emergency or two, and the SmArt School course that I've been taking. It's free to join in the fun and you get the latest and greatest right there in your inbox:

What's Next for Black Ball?

The other day, I made a new file for the next page of Black Ball -- page 167.  That's wild to me! 167 is a a lot of pages to have made, regardless of the amount of time. I've learned so much and have gotten so much better over these past 6 years of making this comic.

My plan for 2025 is to fully focus on Black Ball, because we are nearing the end, folks! Issue 4 saw a major turning point in the plot, driving us closer to the end of this whodunit, and Issue 5 really ramps things up. In the interest of giving this story the best ending possible and just finishing a comic so I'm not driving myself crazy with two long running stories, I want to use 2025 to work solely on making and marketing Black Ball, getting back to regular updates here and on the Black Ball Substack (yes, it's posting on Substack now!) and running the next few campaigns for the following issues. (Hopefully just two more but if we need to go into an Issue 7 we will.)

All this to say, a lot of exciting things are on the way! I hope you'll join us for them.

In the meantime while I work on the new pages, I'll be working to get this site up to date with all the current existing pages (now in a mobile friendly format!) as well as going back to optimizing the existing pages into vertical scroll. I hope you will follow along with us as Emily, Chester, Maude, and Henry finally crack the case of Amelia's murder!

I'll see you in the New Year!

-Melissa J