Comic Report #60.1 - Illuminating (Patreon)

Hello! This week I worked on inking and painting the next comic page, and I've hit a "pretty close to almost done" point in time for today's work report.  I expect I can have this page finished probably by the end of Saturday or Sunday at the latest, so you can keep an eye out for the textless version to be posted in that timeframe, but for now I'll get into my process and what I did this week.

Since this page is a return to the apartment interior, which I'd just kinda roughed in in pencil, I had to go back and archive dive to remember exactly what all the details I gave it looked like.  I mentioned before but I do a lot of archive diving of my own comic to check for details like that.  In the previous arc this meant a lot of checking the backgrounds on specific buildings around the outskirts of Tombstone, but now it means remembering how I painted the gang's living room.  Things like the mirror on the wall next to the door being lighter than its surroundings, and it specifically having that kind of beveled wood frame, or the frames of the paintings above the futon and the chair having dark frames and the wide couch one being a bunch of vertical rectangles and the one above Stacy being a flower.  There is a widescreen TV across from them which is just off all the time, but it reflects the shape of the window at the end of the room, which happens to catch the floodlights outside the apartment.  Details like that, I can recall roughly how a scene is set up but I do need to refresh myself on those kinds of details.

I am coming away from an exterior night scene and moving into an interior night scene. I think on the last page I posted about being excited to stop having to draw the sharp contrasty outdoor shots anymore, but I remembered on this page that it's still dark out and they still don't have power to their apartment so I still have to contend with painting darkness a bit longer.  The interior night shots are a bit different, though, and I'm having a bit of fun with them.  Unlike the sharpness of an exterior lighting contrast, the interior shot has a lot of softer light coming from the candles set up all around the scene, and rather than that faint light diffusing out into an endless dark void, all that light reflects off the walls and surfaces containing the compact space in this one room.  I mentioned last week that I wanted to make sure the apartment feels cozy and safe, and the soft lighting is part of how I intend to achieve that.

Normally when I draw my light sources I try to keep the specific directions the light is coming from very well-defined.  For this scene I find myself kinda loosening up on that rule, in order to achieve the softness I'm looking for.  There's candles at four points around this scene so the light is kinda coming from everywhere, bouncing off walls to kinda just illuminate everything.  I'm kinda defining my light sources specifically, but not specifically? It's hard to explain.  Like some regions of a character I can cast shadows one way, but other regions being closer to other light sources I can cast shadows another way.  It's all kinda loosey-goosey to make the atmosphere feel soft.

When I paint a comic I typically start at the first panel and just go through to the end, but for this one I kinda didn't want to worry about emulating the exact way I painted the book cover previously, so I'm saving that detail for the end.  I'll make a Scarlet & Herringbone pass when I'm done blocking in everything else, and probably include a Kilgör Brew pass as well to get all the logos on the cans just right.  I wanted to get more of the lighting and the scene figured out before today's update so I just put the details like the book cover on the backburner until I got that pinned down.

I'm gonna get back to working on the page now.  I expect it shouldn't be too much longer to have this one finished and on the site so you'll likely be hearing from me again shortly.  Thank you as always for supporting the work I do on this comic!  I couldn't be here without you.