Comic Report #67.2 - Packed In (Patreon)

Hello again!  Here is the textless page real quick before I finish lettering and post the comic to the site.  I'll make this write-up short so I can get right back to work.

Now that the whole background of characters in that fifth panel are drawn in the crowd looks a lot more impressive.  I tried to reference the shot from page 600 as much as I can to keep everyone in relatively the same positions, since I always like to maintain that kind of consistency in my work.  One of the long-time problems I've had with background working in black & white has been making sure the foreground is still distinct, and in a page like this with so many characters packed into one panel I needed a clear way to make sure the depth of field is conveyed.  The technique I used for this was to let the darkest dark of the rows of characters get lighter as they recede into the background- in the very foreground everyone has a pitch black outline, but in the back left the next row's "black" is a dark grey, and the whole row behind them doesn't get darker than a lighter grey than that.  This way, even though there's still darks and lights it is still distinct who is where.

I'll have this comic lettered and posted shortly, I'm almost a little sad at the detail I'm gonna end up covering up.  I think I'll be able to have the pencils for the page after this ready for Friday, since most of my gamedev tasks are non-art related.  Thanks as always for supporting my work, I'll see you again at the end of the week!