Wrong Answers Only - 007 - HD (Patreon)

Fluctuating Rhoda

Commentary

I really like this idea, and if space allowed, my avatar would have shown up in a final panel to praise Rhea for her idea.

Granted, it's a basic "Pinocchio's nose" concept (his nose grew when he lied). Plenty of people have done spins on it, undoubtedly including ones similar to this, so it's not exactly destroying the universe with the power of its originality.

I can still like the idea, darn it, and might do a future storyline in which something like this is the premise.

But TIME...!

I didn't want to fall further behind on my schedule just to indulge this idea, however, and it takes a lot of varied Rhodas to demonstrate this wrong answer. I needed to figure out a way to make this comic quickly, or scrap the idea entirely.

I decided to experiment with layering methods similar to those found in (relatively) low-cost animation. Each Rhoda had a long hair layer, a base layer, and then a layer on top of all that with individualized details.

Given how many individualized details there are, one might expect that not to have helped, but it really sped this up. It's a very contextual thing I can't do all the time (especially since it depends on a mostly static pose), but in situations it could be useful in, I'm going to keep the method in mind.

A New Age

This is something that would have been very difficult to do with my old production style, and that's entirely because I used to ink the thick outlines before everything else. This meant trying to work with layers as described above came with extra complications whenever anything affected those outlines.

Nowadays, the slightly thicker outlines are added as one of the last steps, so that's not an issue at all. This sort of layering nonsense is definitely something I'll be making use of in the future.