Comic Report #59.2 - Put A Bow On It (Patreon)

Real quick, here's the finished textless version of the page for you!  I'll keep this write-up short because as of this moment it's 3:20am and I am excited to get this page online for everyone to see.

I think one of the things that gave me the most challenge in painting this page is the helmet guy's puffy coat.  I tend to draw a lot of hoodies since I think they're really fun to draw and I particularly like the shape a hood makes around someone's neck and shoulders, but I also wanted this guy's coat to be a bit different from just another hooded or collared jacket, so I gave it a fuzzy lining and the puffy coat ridges.  It turns out individually rendering the convex shape of each row of puff in addition to the shape of the body beneath it is kind of a pain to do!  I'll use references sometimes for my lineart but for my painting I'm rendering how I think light would look in a scene that is entirely made up so I gotta kinda just use my imagination.  I'm pretty proud of the light and shadow contouring on his arms in that second panel in particular, I think I got the softness how I want it.

The one thing I'm not going to miss at all when I pick up a new scene in the page after this one is painting a night sky.  I think I've mentioned before but because there's no widespread electricity in the comic world that means there's no more light pollution, which means that when I paint a night sky it's just all stars everywhere.  I tend to have a mental stop for tedium, like stippling or crosshatching, so dotting in all these stars has been just an absolute trial for me over the course of this scene, but now I'm at the end of it I can finally rest.  I'm so tired of drawing little stars- the way I do it is when I have a night sky plotted I'll blotch in a very faint milky way galaxy kinda shape and then dot in a bunch of little stars in an erratic pattern, and when I am satisfied with their distribution I'll make my fuzzy brush larger and start blotting in some starlight on a few particularly bright stars.  I think it works okay but I'm sick of doing it, so I'm happy to finally be at the finish line.

I'd like to spend a weekish focusing on working on some gamedev things before I start up the next scene in the comic. I really gave this fight scene all my energy to get it drawn in a reasonable timeframe but I'd like to shift gears a little bit now that it's wrapped up.  Thank you for being patient with my work!  I'll see you again on Friday.