Comic Report 31.1 - A Change in Perspective (Patreon)

Hello again!  Thank you for your patience over the holiday week. I'm back with a progress report on my work: I'm in comic-making mode right now and I will continue to remain so until this page is finished and posted. This page has been frustrating to paint, and today I will explain a little bit about why that's so.

As I've mentioned before, one of the elements in making a comic page that takes me the most time is backgrounds that involve a lot of depth and geometry.  It's extremely time-consuming and more sensible cartoonists downplay it but I really like to render my backgrounds not just for the atmosphere, but for the context that lets me move the camera around my scene. The backgrounds are how you know where the camera is and where it's pointing, and the shift from panel to panel is how you simulate it moving in space. It's a big pain in the ass but I like working with it so I put in the work and am grateful for readers who are willing to put up with it as well.

I originally sketched panel three of this page to be from a different angle, but I didn't like it. That panel is meant to show the passage of time, but the camera angle I picked was doing a poor job of it and it felt flat.  It also was basically the same camera angle as the final panel, which made it feel redundant and lose its impact, so I repainted the panel from scratch.

Here's the old one:

And here's the new one:

It's a callback shot to the first time we saw the interior of the Jade Garden on page 511, since this is the closing of the chapter I thought it would be nice to see it again in the new context. By putting the window on the left side the eye is drawn to start there, and then as it moves from left to right more and more people fill the booths, in an attempt to make it look like the room is filling up over time to capture the effect I wanted.  There's no pencil marks so I just freehanded it, but I'm happier with this than with my original plan.  That took a bunch of my time and focus so I'm glad to get it out of the way.

I'm going to keep working on the comic until this page is finished, so it should be done by the end of the weekend, then I'll switch back to gamedev for a week and then the three intermission comics should be pretty quick to come afterwards.  Thanks for sticking with us!