Comic Report #4 - A New Approach To Painting (Patreon)

For as long as I've been making comics I've lived with the guilt that I was making them "wrong". In my schooling I was trained as an oil painter, and one of the foremost things we learned was to paint our backgrounds first, and then paint our subjects, or at the very least paint things in a holistic way. When I make comics, somehow in the process of my artistic development, I learned to just paint my figured against a flat grey background and then build the background tones around them, to "save time" or whatever. I knew this was a bad habit to get into and I've known it for years, since painting lighting on a figure before I could even establish contextual values around their form was a dangerous gamble and I knew it was costing me hours of value-correction to do it backwards. In working on the next page of my comic I decided it was now or never, so I'm going to try and break this long-time bad habit and paint things the "right" way, like how I was taught in the first place. Instead of painting my figures and dropping in the background, I'm going to block in my backgrounds first, then paint my figures in that panel, then flesh out the background and the figures together and just build the entire panel as one painting. If I can control my value contrast smartly then I might not need the light glow outline I've been using in my pages, since ideally a figure would have a sense of "pop" without it. This is the first page I'm trying things out on so it's a lot of adjusting but I think it's going to come out alright. I hope to have the page finished by next week, but I thought I'd share this update with you for now. Thanks for your patience and support!