Weekly Update - 157 (Patreon)

Another week, another weekly update!

Chapter 1 is finished. Officially, at long last, and is ready to go in the book. Volume 1 is going to include chapters 1-4, so there's still a ways to go, and it's slow, grinding work, sadly.

Chapter 4 shouldn't need a ton of work, but Chapter 3 definitely has a fair few pages that could use some serious updating. I don't know about Chapter 2... it seems sorta okay, for the most part.

This week, however, I'll be working on and finishing the next Riley Minicomic page. It won't be ready by this Wednesday but I will post it whenever it's finished. It's been too long since I've done a comic and I have a MIGHTY need to post something.

I think I've identified a pattern that will work for the short term, during this stretch, to get all the work I need to get done, done, and not totally burn me out doing it. I think I'll do 2 Character pages (1 week), one Chapter (~couple weeks), then one Riley page (~1.5 weeks) and repeat until finished.

At this pace, it should take me about 4-5 months to get it all done. Just in time for our comic's 5th anniversary in August, perhaps!

Drawing: Riley Page #6

Playing: WoW, also back to Rimworld (still waiting for AoW4, bluh)

Reading: Mistborn (haven't made a whole lot of time for it though lately)

Volume 1: 18/72 Pages Remastered

Next Character Sheets: Martin and Michael

Ramble:

As I'm drawing Riley again, I'm reminded that her nose and the inside of her mouth is purple. Extrapolating this out to veins and other places where her blood might be visible under skin or fur, I imagine it must also be purple or at the very least blue-tinged.

I can't remember if I've ever talked about this before, or explained why it's like that.

I also don't know if anyone's noticed, since the color of her fur can make the purple color of her nose LOOK sort of pink-ish by comparison. Hooray for simultaneous contrast!

Originally it was purely an aesthetic choice, a color combination that I thought played well with the browns and blondes of her fur and clothes. But it was also intended to make her seem a little bit unhealthy. Riley does not take good care of herself. She is frequently getting into trouble, injuring herself, or neglecting her basic needs. I saw the use of purple as maybe a way to subtly indicate this through her design without overtly marking her up with scars, blemishes or other ugly marks that might significantly reduce her intended creepy-cuteness.

When skin turns an off-color, like blue or green or purple, typically that's a visual sign that there's something wrong, something going on under the skin. We see it all the time in cartoon and costume designs, particularly in the undead or in sickly or diseased characters. However, this signal for disease is something I think is generally more applicable to human or humanoid characters than in non-human ones. You can't tell Kiva's health by looking at the color of his nose. His nose is white, pale as snow. The inside of his mouth, however, is a healthy pink color.

Riley's mouth is certainly NOT a healthy pink color, and when the veins bulge in her eyes, the blood running through them is also kinda blue-red. I don't think she's suffering from anything particularly dangerous or terminal. I like to think she's just been affected more, perhaps, by the hazards of her own actions and the hazards of the environment she lives in when compared to the average denizen... but I honestly don't know. Everyone in Kuserra is living in an environment that's pretty toxic, and on average, they've all developed a level of resistance to a lot of the baseline toxins in the soil they walk on, in the water they drink and in the air they breathe. Still, one could surmise that a lot of these chemicals and toxins might affect different people in different ways.

There's something else to consider though, because the deeper you go, the more toxic the environment gets, and it is curious, perhaps, that Riley's mother was an Undergrounder....

I need a nap.