Love Triangulation: Building a Scene (Patreon)

There wasn't quite enough space in my process post about this page to fit in this extra step outlining how I used 3D models to build these particular shots so here's a step-by-step breakdown of how I went about it.

First, though, the why: I felt this establishing shot demanded a very specific sense of scale for the elements we've seen in the story so far (the walker, the base, the alien landscape). I could draw that myself, by the results would be a little wonky in places, and I wanted a very strong sense of scale to to be the main effect of the panel.

Here's my first pass at what I wanted the compositions of both of these panels to be. With organic shapes and landscapes, you can use simple one point perspective to set the general plane that everything takes place on, but then it will naturally undulate as the landscape rises and falls, so you're free to go a lot looser.

The dark smudge running down the panels a 5th of the way in on the left is where the spine of the book will be, so everything immediately next to that line is going to get lost in the spine--which means it can be more of a suggestion of detail than anything finished or overwhelmingly important.

I really wanted that plane between the base and the walker in the first panel to have a strong sense of reality to convey the distance already walked in the page so far, so I took to google Earth!

I flew around the Grand Canyon looking for spots that were naturally similar to my vague landscape design and set the camera at a similar angle and took a bunch of screencaps to match my shots.

I also really liked how the aerial photography overlaid on the 3D models leave all shrubs and scrubs flattened to alien splotches covering that landscape. It gave a vague, alien texture to everything.

After I had my shots composited together, all I had to do was draw them--both to simplify the shapes and to fill in the gaps. Next time I do this, I'm just going to make vague grey smudges where I want it to be dark.

I spent way too much time making these middle steps precise. It's time that went to make great pencil drawings, but when that's incidental to the finished product, it's time that's better spent penciling the next batch of pages.

But in the end, you can really see that the composited elements have a lot more natural grandeur than the initial sketches. The shots benefit from the both the seeming randomness of natural formations, and deliberation of my hand designing them.

All that was left to do was ink! Inking it was more boring than it should've been since I'd left myself very few problems to solve after penciling the shots to death, but there were still some interesting considerations to take into account to keep the forms legible.

Specifically, the tiny little hatch strokes. Two important takeaways about how to render with them is to pay attention to their direction and length. 

• The direction of strokes describes the form. In the case of these mountains, the direction and texture of the slopes. The easiest way to think about them is to consider them tiny little ink balls. They're mostly drawn in the direction that they would roll down the hills. In aggregate, they collectively describe gravity and movement. This idea is related to how the flow of bodyhair can describe the shape of bodies and limbs.
• The length of the strokes describe the scale of objects. Longer strokes will make an object seem--paradoxically--smaller. The way this works is that… if details are big, the object will seem close. It's a trick of how our vision works, applied to the two dimensional plane. So closer mountains have longer strokes, distant ones have smaller strokes. Check the three mountains to the left in the second panel. Compare that with how the strokes merge into black splotches on the most distant range.