Love Triangulation - Page 6-7 Spread Process (Patreon)

So one of the projects I've been hacking away at is a Smut Peddler short for the upcoming manifestation, Smut Peddler Presents: Sex Machine, billed as:

Coming from Iron Circus Comics in 2018: Smut Peddler Presents: Sex Machine. A star-studded erotic anthology about robots, AI, VR, androids, and more. The latest installment in the Smut Peddler series of sex-positive smut.

I'm working with Blue Delliquanti, who's wrote it, and is coloring and lettering. It's the story about a guy getting closer to the AI inside a walker robot while on a mission to rescue his boyfriend. I've had my head down working on it, but it's past time to share! So here's a process shot of a big two page spread from my rough drawings through to the finished inks.

Here are my thumbnails for the layout of these two pages. Blue had it set up as two separate pages, but I took some artistic liberties there. I really wanted to experiment with two page spread-style layouts and full bleed--neither of which I've really really incorporated into the design of a project. As usual, Hirohiko Araki was a big influence here. He's been doing some amazing spread layouts for years now with Parts 7 and 8 of Jojo.

In these pages, the protagonist cyborg has his arms removed by the machine, and it connects to his arm sockets through "cables" in the script. They then leave the base and walk out into the alien landscape together. P.s. the walker robot is a hexapodal (octopodal if you count his little grasper arms) crablike walker tank. 

Taking all of those ideas to the page, I did some rough (and not so rough) drawings on loose paper, and then composited them all together on the page. This is the first project I've been using a printer to print bluelines pencils to ink on top of, so I was experimenting heavily with a digital/traditional workflow. Lots of copying, pasting, resizing, moving to get the compositions right.

I also wanted to see if I could speed up the process by incorporating more photos and 3D models to build more real backgrounds--but it seemed to make the process take even longer. Lesson learnt there. You can see a photo composite in the 6th panel.

I couldn't quite ink on top of the roughs, so I clarified and tightened up everything where it needed it to get my pencils that I'd later convert to a blue to print and ink at A3 size.

I worked on the roughs from Page 1 all the way through to the end at Page 20, so there were lots of elements about the pragmatics of the technology that would be defined by later scenes--how the experience of piloting should look; the size of the cockpit, where the arms go, how the cables work, just how the machine walks. After roughing out the whole story I was able to go back in and make decisions in the earlier pages to establish the technology based on the needs of the script.

So here you can see the cockpit being waaaay more specific (and a copy-pastable drawing *wink*) and the cables taking on a specific snakelike sentience in how it forms a faux musculature. I had originally drawn a design with the cables being sort of braided, but when I finally had it on the page, it ended up being way too busy.

I also built a quick and dirty model of my base design in Tinkercad so I could keep it consistent from panel to panel as it receded into the distance.

(The landscape was also clarified. I'll go into greater detail in a later post on how I used 3D models, compositing and drawing to accomplish that.)

I left the foreground of panel 7 a lot rougher than I would have liked, but the amount of work I was putting into the page to get it inkable was ballooning out of control, so I made a call that that was enough detail and I'd fix it in post, as it were.

And the finished inks! You can see I ditched the braiding on the cables when they coalesce into a quasi-arm shape in panel 3, and I've clarified the cable bundle photo into a cohesive drawing with the parts going into the wall neatly. I also made the snaking cables a little more asymmetrical for the sake of visual intrigue.

Now, the things that terrified me: nailing the motion of the spinning robohand in panel 4 and finalizing the legs in panel 7. The first because I struggle with motion lines from lack of experience, and the latter because it's the first time we really see them unfolded and in motion, so it would establish the reader's expectation for all legs moving forward. I felt pretty okay about both things after the inks were done. And hey, I didn't end up needing to spend more time drawing the foreground elements to death in panel 7 in the end after all. Those rocks and the dust cloud are totally fine.

When I get anxious, I get obsessed with perfecting details--it's a bad habit that makes me much slower than I could be at producing images. I fell prey to it while penciling the landscapes. I ended up drawing them a bit too tightly and leaving very few decisions for myself later in the inks.

Overall though, I'm pretty happy with the finished product.