Comic Report #74.1 - Halfway Home (Patreon)

Hello again!  I've actually had quite a busy week and I've got a lot of stuff to share with you today- a comic update, a minicomic batch and a gamedev post- so please bear with me while I type it all up.

I made a good bit of progress on the next page this week, getting it inked, flatted and halfway prepped on an 80% pass.  These indoor shots have been really light and easy for me to work on, it feels like I could get these pages drawn super quickly if I wasn't also juggling a bunch of other art tasks. I think over time I've just gotten more efficient at painting, too, which helps with how easy this scene feels to actually draw. A few pages back I'd mentioned reading about a new technique for painting backgrounds- staging them with four major values and then working from there- and I gotta say it's really been paying dividends in the efficiency front as well.  

When I approach a page like this I tend to pick out which panels are going to be the "hard shots" and brace myself accordingly.  An "easy shot" is generally one where the background is a close, flat wall and the camera crops the characters from the waist up. Easy Shots are easy because I can make the background just a simple gradient with a few details on it and the characters' bodies just drop off the bottom of a panel.  A "hard shot" is the opposite- there's a lot of depth to the camera which means there's a lot of perspective to render in my head and a lot of facets for me to consider where the light sources would be hitting.  A hard shot also tends to have characters visible below the waist- when you're drawing from the waist-up then things tend to work out but when you're rendering legs you need to make sure everyone looks balanced as well as legs generally being a place with lots of intricate shadow details.  Panels 6 and 9 of this page are two "hard shots" for me, with 9 being the hardest shot of the page.  The last panel is also the panel I like the most so while it's a challenge to approach I'm the most eager to get there.

I expect I can get this page finished this week, so keep an eye out for the textless page to go up.  I'll be working on it through the weekend.  There's a whole bunch of stuff I have written down that I'm really excited to get to draw, so thank you for your patient support as I work my way through these story items.  I've got two other articles to post today so stick around for those!  Take care and be well out there.