Comic Report #71.1 - Almost Ready (Patreon)

Hello again!  This has been a fairly eventful week- our longtime website host had been bought by another company and merged with a third company that didn't support features that make the site work, so we had to find a new host and transfer the site over to keep it running smoothly.  We got those fires putting out and the site seems to be running just fine, but if when the next page goes up there ends up being some hiccups, you can know in advance it's stuff we're ironing out for as we settle in.

I made a lot more progress on the comic this week than I expected, and I'm sure I can have the page ready to post by the end of the weekend.  The other week I'd mentioned this new process of blocking in backgrounds with just four shades of grey- this page has a lot of camera shots that point inward at the wall to the right, which is usually the thing that makes a page faster or slower for me to draw.  This page is all wall shots, barring the first panel, so my background phases are essentially just blocking in grey boxes and then moving on to the character painting, so I'm happy to take an easy shot and run with it!

One of the things I do a lot when painting recurring scenes is I'll go back into my comic archive and reference the last time I drew a given shot.  It's been a bit since I've drawn a diner interior shot, but the key details I need to check up on for this page are which painting I put where on the wall, where the arcade cabinets are set up in the far end of the first panel and where all the electrical cables are running.  Lore-wise the town of Tombstone has their own makeshift electric generator and only a few buildings have access to power at the moment, with the food place being one of them.  The overall aesthetic of Dead Winter is this sort of makeshift bolted-together repaired look, which 100% stems from my own experiences fixing things and working as a mechanic, so the diner interior features some live cables that hang overhead, and I've got to make sure they connect to the walls at the correct places.

I've been feeling really tired today so I think I will let this be the write-up for now. I'm gonna be back very soon with a textless page, so I'll have more to share then.  Thank you as always for sticking with my work, be well and take care out there.