Timelapse and Thoughts - V&M: "Clever Girl" (and the Harpy comic too aaaaaa) (Patreon)

WELP, can you guess who forgot to upload the timelapse from the Harpy comic? When I exported this timelapse, I was like "Whoa, why is the filesize twice as big as it normally is?" and then it all came rushing back to me lol sorry about that! This one's a double-feature :P

As I mentioned in the description of the other comic, I ended up having to re-do the lineart of the Knight comic because of staging issues - here's a detailed explanation of what I meant!

When making panels of a comic, staging is a make-or-break factor. How you place and pose your characters determines how readable your comic becomes - I've seen some comics online with really nice art, but terrible staging, which makes it a pain to view as a reader.

One of the primary changes was swapping the torch-hand of the Knight in all my panels; here's the sketch teaser I posted alongside the end result:

As a stand alone panel, it might not SEEM so bad - but the torch-hand being his left while he's walking towards the right of the panel meant that the torch would ALWAYS be visible in-panel. This immediately became a problem because it blocked out room in the panel for the dialogue - looking at the two panels above, the dialogue in the second panel wouldn't be able to fit thanks to the torch. Plus, his empty hand being behind him meant I wouldn't be able to use it for much of anything without having him awkwardly bend his arm in front of him.

As you see here, with his main in-frame hand holding the torch, most of the free space in the panel gets wasted, and I can't really use his other arm since it's right against the wall - I'd have to cover up the Knight himself by bending the arm in front of him.

Moving the torch to the opposite hand means I can cut it off-frame if I need to, and it frees up the main hand to use for gesturing and other expressive poses! Much better!

However, since I had already done all the lineart, this meant going back and swapping his arms in every panel.

Blegh.

Lesson learned - don't do your lineart until you've mapped out how you're going to place all the dialogue, because otherwise, you might end up not leaving yourself any room at all.