Comic Report #70.1 - On The Menu (Patreon)

Hello again!  I have a new progress report to share this week.  I didn't make as much progress as I had wanted to this week but I think many of us didn't get as much done as we'd set out to either, so I don't feel too bad about it (I still feel bad).  I did pick up a new painting trick this week, however, so I have a bit to share with you.  Anyways, let's get to it!

I made a push through the ink and flat phases of this page to get to the painting phase, which is honestly the most fun part.  I've always been a bit loose with my painting techniques but this week I found this new way of approaching black & white painting that I'm going to try out on these interior shots.  I wish I could link to the tweet but I lost it in the flow of Twitter, but to paraphrase the technique what you do when blocking in a background is break it down into no more than four values, or four shades of grey.  All of your contrast and shape-describing needs can be met by those four shades of grey, so when blocking things in don't worry too much about local color or small value differences- as I am prone to doing- just block in those four values and don't be afraid to let similar values blend into each other with the same level of grey.  I'd never thought to approach backgrounds like this and I think it could shave a lot of fudging and fussing off my workload, so I'm eager to give it a go.  It's going to work particularly well in these interior shot scenes too since it's all enclosed geometry.  

There was a stretch of Dead Winter where I tried drawing everything with no outlines, just painting value contrast to define all my figures- this happened just after the Kickstart My Heart scene, in fact.  I went back to doing outlines because it ended up being faster, but I do like to keep the lineless style for background figures.  One of the tricks of a lineless style is that outlines have width and take up space, but if you place two shapes of sharp value contrast aside one another they can create the perception of a line with no actual width, which makes it really useful for not muddying up tiny little figures in the back of a shot.  When I was inking this page I decided to let the little Lee and Mondays in the background go without being inked, so they can be set up to paint lineless when I make my background passes.  In all the panels- 3, 4 and 5- they're just small enough that if I tried to squeeze a bunch of little lines in to detail their faces or outfits it would look disconnected from the backgrounds they're a part of.  The course of this comic has been a lot of experimentation and growth, and it's nice to be able to pull techniques I practiced in another era back to make my current art cleaner.

This week should be way, way less stressful than the one we're coming out of, so I expect to make a lot more headway on this page.  I think I can get close enough to finished by Friday that I can either have this page done by next Saturday at the latest or maybe before that.  Thank you for sticking with us into another month, I'm real excited about the scenes coming up so I'm really eager to get to drawing them!  Be well and take care out there.