Chocolate comic Process (Patreon)

This comic has a bit more story to it rather than just being an idea I came up with and decided to draw. Originally it was intended to be a part of a small zine alongside some other people, due to the limited number of pages we had we were only given 4 pages to work with. 

This size limitation did become troublesome, the way I had laid things out it felt like 4 pages would leave one of them feeling pretty empty and unnecessary, and while 3 was slightly better, it left the final page very cluttered. Due to leaving one page unused I decided to turn it into a cover lol, I might finish it some other day because I still like how it looks, it's cute!

After sketching my ideas down it was time to start inking, due to the nature of this project involving deadlines, I ended up rushing the hell out of this, having to also deal with commissions and such I think I might've done all of this within 2 or 3 days? And it shows lol, the quality is very low especially considering this is just 1 year old....

As you can notice it was practically done! And not much changed for the newer rendition of it, however, there was still some dialogue and panels needing to be cleaned up, alongside the cover. 

Stuff behind the scenes started to go south lol, and as I noticed that this project was going nowhere I decided to stop working on it (fun fact, this being such a failure ended up being fuel to opening up Patreon lmao), with the intention of picking it back up somewhere down the road where I can rework it without page restrictions and such. And that leads us to present day!

I decided to restart work on this through thumbnailing on my sketchbook, I figured that if I resumed work off of the original file I'd feel limited on what I could do, so changing to a completely different medium was a refreshing perspective on how to change things!

The structure of the original wasn't bad at all, but I wanted to expand on it, I felt like it just dropped you in the scene without much context, so most of the new planning came from the start of it. Shots of the town were added to also show part of the world, I think the setting is just as important as your characters! And establishing shots never hurt to have.

Pages 3 and 4 ended up without much change, while the last two were also lengthened a bit, the original didn't have any breathing room lol so this was a much needed change of pace.

Overall I'm happy with the results! I think over the course of a year I learned a ton about how to use better line weight (the original's linework was just way too thick for its own good lol) alongside hatching. I intended to use more screentones than I did to fasten the process a little bit, but I just like the feeling of cross hatching a bit more lol, it's fun!

From now on I'll aim to use weekends to work on comics while the rest of the week on regular illustrations, I'll try my best to actually stick to that schedule! Definitely helped to get this one out of the door lol