Comic Report #68.1 - My Line Of Work (Patreon)

Hello!  This has been a busy week for me, but I'm happy to have a substantial update for you today! There's a little bit to share so I'm gonna just jump right into it.

Sometimes when I'm working on comics I also need to supplement my work with other work, so I'll hop back and forth between projects.  I'll usually work until I hit a milestone point in my process, then shift gears to start another project until it hits a milestone of its own- like a sketch phase or inks or what have you- and then jump back to the original project.  This week I opened up some commissions for portrait art, so I ended up doing a lot of juggling in between sketching and inking this comic page.  In the past when I did commissions I offered to emulate any art style anyone would like, but this round of commissions I tried working with the gimmick that I'd draw any subject, but in the style I make Dead Winter in.  So to start off, here's a quick look at the pieces I completed this week:

It's a lot of fun to see other characters or subjects outside of my usual crew of goofballs fit in this style.  I think it's a unique look and I'm happy to be able to draw it in contexts other than my usual comic work.  

Back to the comic itself, though: I made it to the part of the process where all my figures are inked, which is probably the most meticulous part of the comic for me.  When I'm sketching I can kinda free-flow my pencilwork and when I'm painting the grey tones I can free-flow my value blending, but when I'm on the inks I need to be slow and precise.  My inks serve the purpose of framing the major shapes of my painting, so if they're not on-point in this phase it's going to cause me problems down the road when I get to actually doing all my 3D-looking modeling work.

This page is kind of stacked with characters.  Normally when I'm drawing a page i try to make sure there's plenty of space for character dialogue to go, but since this is a Monday and Dale page they both speak in really short little sentences, so I can fit their dialogue into some fairly cramped spaces- I should have plenty of space to convey all the verbal exchange I need.

When I ink a page I'll usually just ink the main subjects of the page and leave the crowd figures to just get painted in from scratch.  In the top two panels there's a few figures I still have just sketched in, I figure at this point it's not that important to specify the figures, and I can save myself some time now and let that be a problem for later.  

This week I'll be working on painting this page, I expect I can have this page ready to post next weekend, so my next update will likely be a partial-complete page just before a finished one.  Thanks for the kind support of my work, I'll have more to share next Friday!  Be well out there.