Comic Report #45.1 - The Middle Of The Road (Patreon)

The siren call of working on game work is really strong these days, but this week I focused on getting work done on the next comic page, so this week's update will be all about comics.  

Last week I had about one day's worth of a sketch put together, so I started out this cycle by fleshing out the rest of the page before I jumped to inking it.  In particular I needed a good shot to open the page- I wanted to convey that a good bit of searching has been going on before ultimately finding a clue under a seat. Using a panoramic shot felt like the best option, since I could fit the whole bus in one panel and the bending perspective gives a still shot a sense of time.  I use these kinds of warped perspective shots now and then, and my goal for them is always to capture the feeling of a reader's eye panning from side to side in 3D space.  Humans tend to focus their attention in a small space in front of them, and generally have a sense of peripheral vision around them, but lots of people will tunnel their vision in a tight cone.  When I draw a panoramic shot like this I try to link chunks of perspective together, so when you focus on the left third, the middle third or the right third the perspective is more or less correct according to a camera at a fixed point in space.  You have to really lean back and pull the page away from you to see all these pieces together, but when you're -in- the process of reading and you're scanning from left to right, you'll really only be seeing one part of the wide frame at a time. Like, I take it like this:

This is more or less the three "zones" I think a reader's brain would subconsciously break the shot up into.  Each zone, when split apart, is more or less seen from a correct perspective.  By bending the perspective and welding them together I can create a shot where the physical act of moving your eyes from side to side captures a sense of panning motion where any point in between reads as correct perspective.  If I clipped off the ends and focused on just the middle chunks, like where I split them in the image above, even those would read as correct perspective shots while a reader's eye is scanning:

It's one of my favorite comic techniques. It's a bit of a pain to actually paint all these little seats in proper warped isometric perspective, though, so I'm saving the job of actually painting that top panel for last.  

A lot of painting these kinds of fixed single lightsource shots is figuring out which facets of a 3D object are pointing most or least directly at the lightsource. The fun of these pages is determining what part of which shape is pointing directly at the lightsource, and from how far away, to determine how illuminated they should be.  A complicating factor of doing this in black & white is finding how bright something is as determined by its base value- like Lizzie's workshirt is usually a dark color, so when it gets highlighted it can't really be brighter than her orange hoodie she wears underneath, but both need to read as being illuminated equally. The trick to getting this to work is contrasting the highlight value against the shadow value- the orange hoodie's shadow value in the dark areas may be roughly the same as the dark workshirt's highlight value, but since the highlight areas next to it are even brighter the contrast helps it read as darker than the highlight point of the dark workshirt, which sits in contrast to even darker darks.

I'm expecting to finish this page up by the end of this weekend, around Mondayish. The bottom two panels should be a breeze to knock out but that top one is going to take a lot of brain churning to paint out, but I'm going to do my best.  Thank you for your patience with my work, juggling comics and games. It's a lot to keep in the air but I do try to keep everything moving. I'm happy to have you here on the journey.