Comic Report #69.1 - Adaptation (Patreon)

Hello again!  This has been a bit of a slog week for me- I can't explain why, it's one of those times where your batteries are drained. I think I've been trucking along pretty well during covid quarantine but this week I might have just gassed out a bit, and I didn't get as much work done as I'd have liked, but I did make progress on things.  I've been working on some more Dead Winter style portrait commissions and made headway on some side-job work, but I also managed to ink and flat the next comic page, so I'll go into that briefly today.

I've mentioned before but inking is the most meticulous and difficult part of my comic process, so having that done with is a big step for me.  In the sketch phase you can be pretty free-wheeling with your pencils and in the painting phase you can play fast & loose with blocking in shapes, but when you're inking you need to be precise and careful.  "Good drawing can save bad painting, but good painting can't save a bad drawing" is an old saying I'd learned, and I think it's true.  Since my inks largely define the major shapes that I'm going to be painting in the next phase I need to make sure they're exactly how I need them, or else I'll be going in later and making adjustments to them on the fly, which is often messy.  

While inking this page I felt like I was handling my inks different than I used to.  Since I'd been working on building a big buffer of those minicomics I'd been doing pure ink strips in fairly large numbers and jumping back to the main comic I felt like my linework was a lot more smooth than usual.  It's hard to say since my painting style uses such minimal linework to begin with but it's something interesting I felt in working on this page.  I had a similar experience when I'm making sprites for our game, going back to comics after so much sprite animation I felt like my action and expressive drawing got a lot stronger since I was focusing my brain on a completely different task from painting.  Working on these different projects all seems to develop my artwork in different ways, which benefits the whole of my output.  

Another cool thing about working on the minicomics is how it's helped me shape up different character interactions that aren't immediate focuses of the main comic's narrative.  By being able to freely explore these little vignettes of characters from the comic it kinda helps me approach them in the main story in a much more fleshed-out way- since Lizzie is the main focus of the comic she's definitely the most developed personality, but everyone else gets to equally be a central figure in the minicomics, which helps me out a lot in the main narrative as well.  It's overall just been a great exercise to work on these little vignettes.  I'm happy I could fit them into my schedule.

This week I'm gonna get a lot more painting progress done on this page, and hope to have it close to finished by next Friday's work report.  The scene after this one is a fun one I'm eager to get to, and now that my inks are done it's all downhill from here.  Thanks for sticking with me.  I'll have more to share soon.