Love Triangulation: Debriefing 1 (Patreon)

Now that Smut Peddler has been successfully kickstarted, and I've finished my work on it, I wanted to share some more of the pages and the design work/mentality that went into my choices. (If you missed the kickstarter, I'll have comp copies that I'll be selling at cover price all nicely drawn in when they come in, too.)

So let's start with Pages 1 and 2! They're always the hardest to draw for me, because I don't yet have a clear picture of the characters in my mind. I end up taking twice as long to draw the protagonist's face trying to figure it out as I go, and then spend the rest of the project referring back to successful keystone drawings (and ignoring ones that didn't land quite so well). Shape of the nose, how the eyebrows are rendered, precisely how the hair works in silhouette and direction of flow are examples of details at this stage that are in massive flux.

Hopefully with the next project I can pencil it all, and then go back to the first page to redraw when I ink it all in a second pass. I was so far behind with this project though that I was drawing two pages in the week, inking them on the weekend so they could be colored and lettered straight away, then repeating the process in the next week.

Page 1

After the twin-sunned opening panel, the first thing we see is the base that the beginning of the story takes place in. In the script, Blue had written it as a dome, but I pretty immediately imagined something totally different, so I started designing something else (sorry Blue!).

I'd been looking at a lot of cool visualizations of the mathematical proofs in Euclid's Elements, and I thought it would be neat to infuse the designs of the artificial elements with a similar aesthetic: lots of basic shapes, complementary angles, line segments, etc. Arranging them all together for the first time to create the base that we see maybe twice, but to establish the look of the machines, buildings and user interfaces that follow.

Which ended up here. A large hangar, smaller multipurpose buildings, an airstrip/landing field, and a large, triangular, all-glass atrium in the center. I designed the functionality of the base around everything that would appear later in the story (fighter jets, walker robots, a scene in a palmarium, paths cut by walkers, etc.) to give a very practical, lived-in look to the initial overhead shot to convey what kind of people live here.

The various numbers around the individual buildings were supposed to remind me of how many stories each building would be. I didn't really follow the design to the letter, making various parts taller to make the design look cooler (and bigger!) from the few angles we'll ultimately see it from.

And then from a practical drawing standpoint, I ended up applying an isometric grid to the entire panel, and mapping the base to that. In this early draft I thought the overlapping of the bigger buildings in the foreground over the background smaller buildings would look neat and complex, but when I actually projected it up, it looked kinda plain. So in the final drawing, I had to rotate the base 180º for visual interest. From there, I projected out what I felt would be natural roads onto the landscape and added lived-in details like outdoor storage, parked jets, and some walkers going about their business.

As we zoom in on the protagonist we see the floor of the atrium has a large proof of the Pythagorean theorem which I felt was pretty universal to everyone's education that it might seem elemental enough to decorate the floor of the group's chill out green space.

Page 2

This early character art was probably the third pass I had taken at the character, and despite bits being super vague scribbles, other elements were incredibly clear in my mind. You can basically see the non-scribble elements here being drawn consistently right from the start.

I drew a lot of this comic on tiny A5 sheets of paper, scanned them, and then used the transform tool to get right. This phone originally had a really squat aspect ratio until I squashed it horizontally into a taller, thinner one that looked more appealing for a phone. From there I took design elements from other parts of the comic and applied them to this tech--the rubberized grip from the protagonist's hands, the eye of the walker robot that would show up later as a camera, the mathematical proofs.

This is also the point where I had to choose a font that they'd use in-universe for all of their user interfaces--never an easy decision. I ended up going with a typeface called OCR-A. It's a typeface from the late 60s that was designed to be easy for machine eyes to read, at the cost of it being harder for humans to read. It's lived in the periphery of most of our lives for decades, so despite being kinda ugly, I thought I'd try designing around it. A decision I liked, regretted, and then came back around to by the end of the project.

On the right we have our deuteragonist, Gamboge (Gam for short). His design was already set (and I'll go into that in greater detail next week!) by the time I had to come up with a second walker robot.

And to be honest I kinda like the second walker robot's design even more. Always a fan of robot high heels.

I made both of these drawings by collaging various pieces of legs and arms and body and eyes and everything I'd drawn after giving up on trying to draw the complete silhouette in one go. There were too many separate pieces for me to manage the scales of all of the elements in my brain at once, so I figured that I would have better luck doing it by eye.

So I cut and pasted and resized all of the little arm and leg bits until the overall silhouette reached a sweet spot between functional, cool, and silly (because they're still walker robots after all. They can't not be a little silly. But the key is finding the right amount of silly).

Next time we'll get into character design in greater detail!