Comic Report #45 - A Rough Start (Patreon)

I'd planned on spending this whole week working on comics but a number of urgent gamedev items came up that needed my attention, now that we've got the kernel of our game getting back into shape a lot more features are coming online and they need some art asset or stat adjustments so Jason can expand on his end of them.  This week, however, I will definitely commit my full time to finishing this page, but for now I wanted to at least block in the pace of the comic so I know what I'm working with going into the work cycle.  Today, though, I'll talk a bit about this really really early phase of the comic process I usually try to draw further beyond for my weekly updates.

My goal for this page is to convey Lizzie searching the bus for clues and try to end it on finding something new to roll into the next page with.  One of my long-time bad habits is really wanting to expand on everything, and I could easily make a whole page about searching with no result, but I need pages to end on a significant point so I am making sure this page condenses down to both "searching" and "discovery".  Expanding on what the thing that was found was can be the focus of the next page, but for now I want to get to the point and move on.

When I block in my pages I always set up the panels first before I worry about the artwork. I try to not use the same panel layout two pages in a row, and laying out my panel arrangement can help me plot how a comic flows from beginning to end.  For this page I wanted to convey "searching" as the core feel so I laid out my panel borders with lots of sloped angles.  The long horizontal angled sections are meant to both convey a tilting feeling of searching high and low, angling your head and moving around looking for something; and also the shape of the angled panels is meant to invoke the shape of a flashlight beam pointing left, right, left.  I think the panels convey what I need them to succinctly so I'm happy with that result.

I was torn over how I wanted to end this page, which is why the last two panels are really sketchy block-ins.  An initial version had the book being found at the end of the last tilted panel, and then the last two panels are reaching in and then showing the cover, but what I want to do on the next page is focus on what's inside the book, so I thought I should leave the book reveal as the very last panel, like if the whole page is about searching then you stop searching once you find something, that makes more sense.  The first panel is blank because I'm not sure how I want to set up the page yet.  Two thoughts I had were a) an exterior shot of the bus with the glowing flashlight beam lighting up the inside through the windows, or b) an interior shot from above where most of the page is seen as an isometric perspective view of Lizzie snooping about inside the bus.  I had considered hammering one of the two out for this post but I think it's fair to show this part of my process as well, how I don't really work from top-to-bottom and will often start from the middle and work outwards.  

I'm really excited to handle the lighting on this page.  Basically every shot I'm blocking in is planned to have really strong light contrast in depth & space so the painting is going to be a treat.  That will probably be the focus of my next post when I have more of the comic done, though, so I'll just leave it on that note for now.

As mentioned, this week I'll be working more on getting this comic done. I try to balance both halves of the work but there might be times in the near future where gamedev hits a big upsurge and I need to shift focus to get over a new hurdle, but I don't want to neglect the comic half of my work either.  Thank you, as always, for your patience and support.