Just today I passed a significant milestone: I finished the artwork for the last page of Tonoharu: Part Three! The whole book (and by extension, the whole series) now exists in a complete, readable state. Hurray!

Only two main things remain before the book is 100%, unequivocally done:

1) The Dust Jacket
This includes the front and back cover, the spine, and the inside front and back flaps. It will follow the same basic template as the first two Tonoharu hardcovers, so there won’t be much design work to worry about, but the front cover artwork will be as intricate as ever, so I expect will take a few weeks (a couple months?) to finish.

2) Post-Production Work
2a) Housingkeeping
At the bare minimum, I need to go through all the panels and fix any spelling mistakes, tweak the text layout and word balloons, and confirm that all the files are set up correctly to go to press. Completing these minimal edits shouldn’t take too long on a per-panel basis: I’d estimate less than two minutes per panel. But since the book contains over 700 panels, (and since I can only work on it on evenings and weekends since I have a day job) it’ll probably take a few weeks to finish.
2b) Artwork Edits
What’s more of a wild card is the artwork edits. The entire book now exists in an acceptable state, but I’d still like to go back and fix some of the artwork that I’m not happy with. Most of these edits should be minor, like redrawing a character’s face and using Photoshop to Frankenstein it into the preexisting art. In rare cases, I might redraw panels from scratch, or add a couple of pages here or there to help with the flow of the story.
For Tonoharu: Part One, I did artwork edits to pretty much 100% of the panels (in some cases, even editing them two or three times). For Tonoharu: Part Two, I only did it for about half of the panels. I’d like to continue the downward trend with the third book, and only do art edits to 25% of the book (or less; we’ll see how much I can keep my perfectionism in check).

Between the housekeeping stuff and the artwork edits, I expect the post-production work to take a few months to complete.

So to sum up: I estimate the remaining work on Tonoharu: Part Three should take about half a year to complete. This means I should be totally done with it right around the end of the year.

This still puts me on track for my planned October 2016 release. (For details as to why I plan to release it ten months after my anticipated completion date, see this entry.)

I’ll probably also unveil the cover for Tonoharu: Part Three sometime this summer, and then will put up the final Tonoharu: Part Three progress report a few months after that. So stay tuned!