Swole Mates Page 08 (Patreon)

Harrow!

Thank you all for supporting me through the month of October! As I've shared earlier, my current goal is to get all the remaining work-in-progress draft pages hammered out so that I can start moving into the ink phase starting this month.

If you can recall, I'd made some structural and pacing changes at the mid-section of the comic. What was once projected as a 12-page comic is now 16-pages, and the newly added page 08 took me the longest time to work on as I was trying to tie 2 separate ends together from the former structure.

Normally I work with thumbnails to get a better overview of things, and the unforeseen additions had somewhat disrupted my workflow. For weeks I couldn't figure out what was bothering me and preventing me from finishing up the page 08 draft below:

On its own, the page seems fine for all intents and purposes, but my intuition from years of doing comics, is that I'm always looking for a sort of "flow" when it comes to reading and viewing the panels. My personal gauge for a good comic (visually) is that readers should be able to grasp the essence of the story even without dialogues, since ultimately comics are a visual medium. In context of the other pages 07 and 09, page 08 needed to push readers forward to want to find out more.

Unless you've dropped in on one of my live art streams or checked out a featured stream, it'll probably be difficult to imagine just how much trial and error goes onto a page before it finally reaches its "pass" stage. Just reworking the last panel on page 08 took me at least 3 hours to arrive at a pose, composition and silhouette that was readable and strong enough to my liking. I also didn't want readers to "stay" too long on the last panel, so I've swapped positions between the 2 so that the larger "pin-up" panel goes first and the smaller one is now at the bottom. You can see the end result here:

Hope you guys have been enjoying the updates, I know that while the process is slow (and agonizing at times), trust me, I can't wait to share more with everyone! Thank you again for your patience and support!

Snares
Nov 2021