Comic Report #50.1 - Lights, Cameras, Action (Patreon)

This week I worked on inking and painting the next page.  Normally I only ink my main subjects in a panel and leave the backgrounds empty to free paint later, but since these are action pages the majority of each shot is main subjects so I ended up doing a lot of inking.  Compared to the pencil phase one of the motion details I wanted to convey- the hat guy taking a mop javelin to the face and falling backwards over three panels- reads a lot better now that it's inked and prepped to paint cleanly, the throw-and-catch sequence was probably the one I anticipated would be hardest to execute in planning.

Normally when I paint narrative or dialogue sequences I need a lot of background detail to sell the context and the environment. I've talked about it a lot in previous pages but I put so much detail into backgrounds because the background defines the camera's position within a panel, and the way to convey the motion of the camera itself from panel to panel is to have clearly defined backgrounds you rotate between shots.  In action sequences I still want to track location within a scene to background is still important but I don't need to fill it with quite as much detail and lighting since the background itself is way less important than the primary action in the foreground.  In an action shot all the detail contrast is cranked to extremes- you want to highlight the main details and everything else either serves the action or it's a distracting bit of visual noise.   I'm using my 80% painting-pass method on this page, so I'll come back and make a detail pass later, but even though I drew in all the background features they're mostly just shapes, and when I tune them up I'm going to paint them in kinda rough so they're interesting to look at but do not draw more attention than the main action in a scene.

One of my favorite parts of drawing action is the specific way I can use lighting.  Normally when I'm painting dialogue or story segments I want to define my lighting environmentally, based on where the light sources are within the scene itself.  With action scenes, however, I can define my light source in a much more abstract way- by painting all my lighting around the center of impact I can make every surface in a scene direct the eye towards the primary point of action.  You can see this shaping up in the 3rd and 4th panels, the lighting on everyone else's bodies and faces point towards the impact point of the mop and the slide tackle.  By making those points the center of attention I can help sell the force of the impact, and doing it in my usual painterly style I can give the scene an extra sense of space and depth.

It seems like when I hit this point in a half-finished comic I say, "oh I'll probably be done by Monday" and finish it up over the weekend, and this page seems to be no different.  I should be able to finish this comic and have it posted by the end of the weekend, so keep an eye out for that.  I'll be sure to post again with the dialogue-free page, even if there won't be too much actual speaking.  Thank you again for your support of our work!