Comic Report #51.1 - Clash! (Patreon)

Continuing momentum on finishing comic pages, I've got inks and partial painting done on the current page.  Gamedev-wise we're in a phase of implementation and testing so I've been tinkering with numbers here and there getting new elements working but all of my art time has been focused on comics so things are moving along briskly.  As seems to be the case lately, I expect I can have this page finished by Monday evening as I work through the weekend, but for now I'll give you my progress report for this week.

Painting these action shots has been really fun, I've been applying a bit of what I learned from animating game sprites to these shots, like how to capture different weapon effects with different style animation smears.  For example, I want to maintain a distinction between the blunt-force strike of Lizzie's mop handle to the danger of her opponent's steel-edge sword cutting through the air, so when I planned Lizzie's swing I have it represented as momentary chunks of the wooden handle moving in an arc, similar to when you see an airplane propeller spinning and it looks like just weird chunks of shape- that to me represents the kind of force getting hit by a wooden staff would inflict.  In contrast to that the Poncho lady's sword cuts in long sharp shapes, it's a slicing motion so representing it with an edge and a direction makes it feel sharper than the mop pommel method.  It's an aesthetic distinction I want to maintain for the rest of the scene and a lot of it comes from the work I did on our game sprites, so it's kind of fun to apply it back to the comic the game originated from.

These action shots have been moving quicker than I thought they would, painting-wise, and I think part of it is because of how I'm ending up simplifying the backgrounds.  My goal is to keep the action as the central focus of the panels so the backgrounds take a more supporting role than I usually give them.  I still want to track where the action is happening and where the camera is, though, so the method I'm using is to block in backgrounds with broad shapes and values to keep my foreground elements central, and then from there I can carve out background scenery depth to give the action a defined location.  You can see this prominently in the first and third panels, I kinda blocked in my broad values and then cut the building facets out of that to give the shot a specific place.  That's still important to me to maintain so I'm giving it a shot in these shots.

I've been doing these pages in my 80% method, where I get my painting mostly done and then brush up detail in a final pass to keep myself from getting stuck in place.  I'll be blocking in the last panel tonight and then over the weekend I'll be polishing it up and, as mentioned, should have this page finished and posted by the end of the weekend, so keep an eye out for that progress.  Thank you, as always, for supporting my work. I couldn't do it without you.