Comic Report #52.2 - Impact (Patreon)

As promised, here's the textless version of the next page.  There honestly isn't going to be a whole lot of text but I gotta put these up to keep with the tradition.  There's a couple little details I put in from last time on my final detail pass that I'll talk up real quick before I jump in and draw up the word bubble.

The first panel, I flip-flopped on if I wanted to put a sound effect there for the lockup break carrying over from the previous page.  Instead of a vertical onomatopoeia like I originally planned I gave it a lighting bolt and some panel shake effect around the border, and put a KRAKK across the top to kinda convey the energy snap that I want to.  The other two top panels on two and three have a flowy dust effect to try to convey a sense of quiet stillness as the fight turns from 1v1 to 2v1.  I really like the dust effect in the third panel, I hadn't initially planned on those but I put them in after adding the little lighting crack and I think they really capture what I was intending.

In the penultimate roll I wanted to really embellish the flow of momentum from the runner so I added some white-grey translucency to my top layer.  When I paint a comic I keep my inks on a top layer, characters are a middle layer and backgrounds are on the bottom, and if I want to paint overtop of the inks themselves I have a separate layer I use.  In Photoshop I can ctrl+click my ink layer and character paint layers to select their combined silhouettes, and then in the top layer just easily paint over exactly the shapes I want.  The little translucent duck poof above Lizzie in panel 7 is all from this effect; the faded legs on the runner zombie in panel 8 I just painted that way manually and then lightened the inks themselves.  There's a lot of overlapping characters in these panels so after I put in my light glow outline in a layer between background and character painting I'll go into that topmost layer and put some glow lines overtop of the lineart, to break up silhouettes into distinct shapes.  This page has a lot of those overlaps in general but that second to last row used a lot of them.

I'm gonna hop back and knock out the last of my text and get this page up on the site.  I have this whole scene plotted out so I should have the pencils for the next page ready for this Friday's update, as well as some clips of gamedev things to share.  Thanks for sticking with us!