Comic Report #52.1 - Halfway There (Patreon)

This week I got the inks done on the next page and made it past the halfway mark for painting interior values.  There's a few fun things to post about this week so I'll jump right into it.

I was initially worried that the number of panels and characters would make this page take a long time but I've hit a rhythm with this work and I can just render what I need to more quickly.  I know exactly where my light sources are and I'm hitting my value contrasts right off the bat- in older pages it would sometimes take me a bit of effort to layer on lights and darks to get my contrast just right, which was probably a big contributor towards the comic having that painterly feel to its aesthetic, just coming from layer upon layer of lights and darks.  In more recent pages I've been feeling much more confident about picking the right values right away, so I'm able to more quickly establish the contrasts between light and dark that I need to describe depth and contour in my figures.  The fact that the figures on this page are smaller might help them taking less time to paint, despite being more numerous, but I think it's at least partly down to the momentum of just making comics with all my game animations finished.

I get to use one of my favorite effects on this page.  When I draw depth and 3D space in the backgrounds of my comics I don't use rulers or guidelines, I just eyeball them and do them freehand.  The reason I do it like that is because I feel it gives the perspective a more organic bend, like if you turn your eyes to look at one part of a panel and then to another they're not all seen from a static position, the lineart bends a little bit to accommodate the direction the viewer's eyes would be looking from.  In panel six, the really wide central shot, I get to bend the perspective beyond normal tolerances.  On the left side the viewer's eye is looking down the left side of the field, towards the big Brother's Auto sign on the brick wall in the direction of the river, and on the right side the viewer can look to the right, near the main flood lights at the gate, in the direction where Lizzie snuck into the bus a few pages ago.  Because of the way a viewer's eye focuses on a point you don't really "see" both sides at once unless you're pulled back looking at the whole thing, you either focus on the left, the middle or the right of such a wide panel.  When I do my final detail pass I can put in the brick lines on the wall behind Lizzie, but it's essentially bending in a curve with Lizzie and the dark section at the crest of the visual hill.  The bending shot is one of my favorites to paint but I try not to overuse it, so I'm excited to get to paint one on this page.

The very first panel of this page is meant to represent a break from an entanglement at the end of the previous page, and I tried to think of a way I could convey that in painted backgrounds.  I opted for a sort of semi-translucent burst effect, more opaque in the middle but with more brickwork lines the further out from center you go.  I'm not entirely sure the effect conveys what I want it to; I'm thinking about adding some kind of sound words, like KRSSH or KCCHHH, to represent the break.  Some nice big letters in a kind of \ slanted vertical orientation, I think that might do it.  I'm saving that for the final detail pass, though, since the partial-completion first-pass approach has really helped me keep from over-fixating on minor details.

I'm expecting to have this page done over the weekend, as anticipated.  Monday at the latest, possibly a little earlier.  I'm not planning on having too much dialogue on this page but I will still post the textless version when it's ready.  We have some exciting game development news in the works that needs to bake a bit longer in the oven, so game friends keep an eye out for that.  But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the comic work coming through lately.  And as always, thank you for supporting our work.