"Ferrochrome" - viii.01 (Patreon)

Back with more pages and a new chapter! This chapter is kind of a big turning point in the story, so I was excited to make the images in my head more concrete. I've also been investing a lot of time  behind the scenes in 3D modeling to build up a base for more ambitious drawing later in this (and future) comics.

In Love Triangulation, the short I drew for Smut Peddler, I bashed together other people's 3D models for landscapes to capture a sense of scale in the finished drawings, but the approach didn't give me quite enough control over my landscapes. So for this book's shots of islands, big overhead flying shots and spaceships, I resolved to bridge the skill gap in my spatial drawing skills with 3D stuff. I wanted to use this chapter as a vector for learning some new skills--specifically Blender and Unity.

In this particular page I left the backgrounds a little barren, since I'd like to recreate the coffee shop in Unity so I can actually walk around in it to enhance the sense of place in the final drawings with my earlier perspective drawing of the interior of the shop as a base.

Since the Tender Wolves coffee shop is such an important space in many scenes, I wanted to try building out a less important interior first to see if it would even be possible or effective as a workflow. This chapter provided the perfect opportunity in Farees' apartment which shows up a few pages into the 8th chapter.

Unrelated to all of that, on this page, I was really chasing interesting shapes for the characters, so the likenesses really slipped. I'm hoping by the end they'll coalesce into something so when I do the final art pass there'll be some degree of consistency, but as always I prefer to let the characters be consistent until they settle on their own. I don't have any interest in forcing something, despite how much I reference past drawings to recapture a likeness. I think it's more satisfying to draw what feels correct for a character than what is on model.