Comic Report #66 - Quartets (Patreon)

Hello!  This week has been a busy one for me.  I took a bit of time to tie up some loose ends with my gamedev responsibilities and then got to work on the next comic page.  A fun note about the gamedev items: I've drawn everything I need to draw for the next milestone demo we're working on, so any other gamedev tasks moving forward are a lot lighter on my plate.  I write very in-depth articles on that process here on this Patreon, so if you'd like to pop up a tier and read the archive for a month there's a lot of technical explanation you may find interesting. 

However!  This article is about the comic, so I'm gonna focus on that for now!  Because I put in a bunch of time on other tasks the comic's sketch phase is still in an early construction stage, which shows off a deeper layer of my process that I don't get to share too often.  All the panels and the layout are finished but the figure construction is very rough and early in some spots so I'll talk a bit about how I build my comic figures today!

Over time I've sorta developed the shorthand way of blocking in figures that I like the best, to make things quick and cartoony. I can crank up the technical illustration element when I need to but if I'm just drawing a lot of people I tend to just try to find their energy and define that with shapes.  I don't use a ton of construction lines, but instead tend to work with a circle and a bent rectangle, like so:

On the left is the general energy of a standing pose, the springlike curve of a human spine along with the non-parallel lines of the hips. I used to draw these things in with rib ovals and hip ovals but honestly the lines suffice for what I need, so I just started connecting them and make a rectangle that can express a wide range of what I need it to.  I think I really started doing this with my gamedev work, since I needed to block in a ton of poses very efficiently, and that sort of ported its way back into my comics.  Rendering the feet as triangles lets me give them the information I need to know where they're pointing when I render a proper shoe on them, and for the limbs a curved relaxed line will define the energy of a pose enough for me to block in when I'm ready.

In the top panels of this page you can see some of my block-ins using this method, particularly with Dr. Parker, Melody and Dr. Pheiffer.  In the lower panels you can see Lizzie and Alice at a more defined state of this method, where I'll attach triangles for shoulders on either side of the upper torso and block in some more of the details to better define the character.  When I sweep through on my inking pass the linework becomes a lot more organic, this is just constructing the skeleton of the house before putting the siding up.

As for the content of the page: the core theme of the past few pages has focused on quartet clusters of characters reuniting with each other- with Lizzie, Alice, Lou and Monday meeting up with Melody, Clark, Amy and Dale again.  At the top of the page is a carryover from Melody reuniting with her mother, the town's main doctor, Dr. Parker.  I want to give them room to breathe, but this reunion sets up a later event, since Dr. Parker is telling Dr. Pheiffer that she intends to take the day off, and that he and Alice will have to cover the medical bay themselves.  They're old coworkers from a previous hospital, and Alice has told Lizzie stories about his practice, which is a bit unorthodox, so I wanted to capture that expression in her eyes for a panel.

Further down the page the question arises of, how did you find Tombstone in the first place?  How did you get here?  The answer to that emerges in the last panel- the mayor's Gravekeepers.  These guys have popped up here and there so far just enough to sort of be established as a Thing but in this context the extend of their privilege to go outside of Tombstone freely and the power they hold internally is on display.  So here is a third quartet, favorable with the Omnimart gang but only acquainted with half of the main crew, having been shown up by Monday and Lou once before.  Their core theme established this far is that they're assholes, they have weird custom weaponry and a bunch of friends.  There's sort of a lot of strings attached to them that you'd end up pulling in if you clashed horns with them which, who knows?  That may end up being a thing later on, but for now they're the truck guys who brought supplies to Tombstone.

Since my gamedev art responsibilities are pretty much caught up to where they need to be I'll be focusing more on comic work, so I will have more to share with you in the future.  Thank you, as always, for supporting my work.  Be safe out there, I'll be back next Friday.