Comic Report #127.3 - The Final Countdown (Patreon)

At the start of this month I wasn't sure if July would go by really fast or really slow, and right now it's feeling like it's going really quickly. We're halfway to August and I'm doing cleanup and some final fun little art tasks for Kitsune Tails, and in about two weeks I'll have credits on a shipped and finished game. I'm at the bottom of the barrel for things to be working on, so I've been putting a lot more time into painting the next comic page. I feel like we made it. I feel like we survived. Now we just gotta get it out the door and see if people like it. That'll be just two more weeks away.

It's been a bit of fun climbing out of the very deep pixel mines and getting back to high-fidelity light-and-shadow painting. I feel like I'm warmed back up into the process, so I think I can get the rest of this page painted up this week, before next Saturday like I initially predicted. That last panel has me a bit nervous, but I won't know how long it'll take me to hack through that until I get there, probably on Monday. On the one hand, there's a lot of people in there and more people usually means more time to render; but on the other hand, most of the people are shoulders-up headshots so there's really not too much to paint.

This will probably be the last candlelit inside-the-apartment page in this scene, so the next ones should be a bit easier for me to do. When I start a new scene all the lighting is fresh so I can kinda build it off the cuff, but the deeper I go into a particular scene the more I find myself referencing prior pages to make sure I get everything consistent. Consistency in staging and the dimensionality of 3D space is something I try to maintain throughout my comic pages, and that's always much easier when I'm first setting it up compared to when I have to check what I did. It's the difference between freestyling something and then following a guide- I have this infinite free potential on what or how I can make my art when I am establishing a scene, and after that that infinite spectrum narrows to something a lot more specific and rigid, which always slows me down. This scene has been fairly complex in that regard, with the camera turning and rendering everyone in the correct spots, but this should be the end of it.

I'm gonna try to aim to have this page finished by next Saturday. It might end up reaching a little ways over, maybe be a Sunday thing, but I'll definitely have it in the can well before the end of this month. This has been a pretty intense ride for me but we're stabilizing, and I think once August hits things should be back to normal. Thanks for checking in! I'll be back sooner than later, hopefully. Until then, stay cool out there.