Comic Report #43.1 - Background Check (Patreon)

Hello! This was a bit of a short week, since I was traveling to be with family for the holidays, but I did get a big chunk of work on the next comic page finished.  The hardest thing about this page is probably also the easiest- the repeating background- so I'm happy to get it all done and out of the way in time for this update. 

For as long as I've had art classes one of the hardest things for me to focus on has been repetition.  When I learned stippling or shading with little ink dots or hash marks I have a hard time focusing on minute repetitive tasks.  My brain works a lot better on bigger repetitive tasks, it's hard to put into words. Like, I've been animating a video game all on my own, drawing duplicates of a lot of actions when I need to boil something, but that exists above a threshold of mechanical tedium.  I think painting in all the repeating background panels on this page sits right on that threshold. 

To start out I painted the background panel to about 50% completion in one of the larger panels, and then I copied it and moved it to all the other panels in the still camera scene.  With the painting half-completed I went through each panel and fleshed out the details, like the lighting on the edge of the sear or the texture or the gradients so that the slight variations in how I painted that detail prevent each panel from looking mark-for-mark identical to the last- I wrote about how I feel this is distracting in my last entry on this page.  The tedium in this process, though, is rather than just focusing my brain on painting the scene as it appears in each panel, I also have to keep track of which detail I'm currently working on and remember to paint it into the other six panels as well, lest I forget and leave that detail omitted.  This is the part where I think I start to feel the fatigue of repetition, is keeping track of the minute detail on top of all the lighting and perspective rendering I'm churning my brain to work on, it's like running another program while the big main one is using up most of my RAM, the work starts to get a bit choppy.  I'm through that part, though, and I expect I can finish the rest of this page by Monday, so I'll definitely have the new page ready to read before the end of the month.

I lost a bit of time this week to the holidays but I'm not going to frame that as an item of regret, I am happy to take time to see my family.  Right now, though, I'm going to get back to work and knock out the rest of this page as quick as I can.  Thank you for your patience!