Comic Report #7 - Lights, Camera, Action (Patreon)

Here's a look at the current page (544) without any word bubbles- this time rather than wasting a bunch of time painting in background I was just gonna cover up I added my speech beforehand and used the bubbles to "cheat" and not have to render anything.  This normally isn't a very big deal but since I have a fixation on rendering every single background in a contextually-consistent perspective that can add up to a lot of little details I don't have to do simply because someone is a bit of a blabbermouth.  I'll also avoid fill buckets and gradient tools and do all my painting by hand, which you can see when the bubbles are removed.

One of the details I was most proud of in this page was the panel transition between panels four and five.  Wherever I can I try to avoid redundant or repetitive panels (unless the repetition is the whole point), and in this scene I wanted to draw Lee moving from the right side of Liz to the left.  My solution was to turn Lee's silhouette into the panel border, so when he's on the right  Lizzie is on the left in the first panel, and then you see the back of his head on the left when Lizzie is in the right, so one black shape creates two consecutive moments in time on one row of panels.  I always love an opportunity to get fancy with presentation of time and space, it's one of the things I like most about making comics.

Another detail I really enjoy in making comics is dynamic lighting.  Indoor scenes can wear on me a little bit for how ubiquitous modern indoor lights are- they're everywhere, so they tend to wash out a lot of the fun stuff.  The scene has moved outside, however, where it's dark out and the only lights come from overhead spotlights, which means I get to paint lovely high-contrast lighting again! Night scenes are my favorite to paint, and given Tombstone is a town with limited electricity that means a lot of candlelight and a lot of soft modeling. You can probably see how big a difference it makes in the above panels, I love it!

One new detail I got to try for the first time on this page is actually one of the most background elements of the comic.  In panel six there's a spotlight shining down through the darkness- normally I'd just make this lighter than the surrounding dark areas but this time I experimented with an atmospheric element to really make it feel like a big cone of light.  In addition to the normal gradient light painting that I normally do I tried out a gradual fading of details, where the more intense the light got the less of what's behind it you can see; this is because the light isn't actually shining on the wall behind it, but rather on the ground in front of it, so it made sense to illuminate the air between the camera and the wall rather than just illuminating the wall itself.  I'm gonna get a lot of use out of this trick moving forward.