Comic Report #48.1 - Progress (Patreon)

This week my focus was entirely on comic work.  I fleshed out the sketch I had from last week, inked it and began work on painting the page.  As seems to be the rhythm of these pages, I expect to have the finished page posted by Tuesday at the absolute latest, possibly late Sunday night at the super-earliest.  There aren't too many panels to do and sometimes I surprise myself by how quick I get something done.  This is a pretty standard "halfway-finished" page state so I'll jump right into my post for the week:

One of the changes I made to this page before inking was the top middle panel.  In last week's sketch I had a reaction shot of the Poncho guys in that place, but this week I replaced it with a shot of the undead.  My thinking was that I had the whole previous page to highlight the reaction of the Poncho crew, so they're taken care of, but I want to set up an action sequence that involves the undead shuffling in and getting in the way during fight choreography, so spending a panel to show them being alerted by a loud noise sets up the future interactions more cleanly.  

I'm really really happy with how the lighting in the big Lizzie panel is shaping up.  I can struggle with these kinds of shots where I can't get the value contrast how I need it but this time I really just put the lights where I need it and it's starting to convey the effect I was hoping for.  I started out by building the light from midtone greys, like from the middle 30% of the black -> white spectrum, and layered lighter or darker tones on top to get the contrast I need, which is usually how I should work but I sometimes don't.  I'm employing the 80% background painting method from the last page in this one as well, where I'll paint backgrounds to about ~80% detail satisfaction and then make a final detail pass when it's all done, since that worked really well in speeding up my work last time.  It's nice to just mentally clear out space and move on to the next item on my list without overloading my internal memory with detail attention.

When I ink a page, sometimes I leave certain figures uninked, as you can see in this page.  The reason I would choose to do this is usually if characters are far enough in the background that they're really small- small enough that ink lines would not do them any service- I'll treat them as a background element and paint them in in my lineless paint method.  When painting lineless you don't have ink lines to define major shapes, so value contrast between one field and another is used to describe the shapes of a figure.  Lines are very useful in speeding up the painting process and making things clear, but lines have width and if you are working very small there is an economy of space, so having an outline would take up valuable real estate and muddy up a painting.  Lineless contrast conveys the same separation as lineart but the border between one lineless field and another is infinitely small, like an impossibly thin line with no actual width to it at all, so when space is a premium I'll employ this method to get as much out of a small figure as possible.  I'll usually build these figures by painting in a silhouette and then blocking in major detail regions with hue contrast- like a shape for the face and jawline, a shape for hair or a hat and a shape for the upper torso, specifically the pectoral and deltoid shapes.  When blocking in these kinds of shapes I tend to leave the neck blank if a character doesn't have a particularly thick one, since the neck is thin and receded from the camera it can be implied by painting the jawline above it and the sternoclavical area below it, the mind fills in the blank very well and at super-small scale this usually works just fine.  I'll be painting the Ponchos in the penultimate panel in this method; Lizzie in the last shot will probably be a one-color silhouette since she's so small that detail may not actually exist at her scale.

That's all the major points I have to write about today.  I'll be getting back to work and hopefully have this page done by the projected Tuesday update date.  Thank you, as always, for your patient support of our work!  We've got lots of other exciting things to share in the works.  Have a nice weekend!