Comic Report #105.1 - Over The Line (Patreon)

Hello!  I made a bit of progress on the next page this week.  I've felt sore and tired so I took a bunch of rest to keep from overworking myself, but I did manage to get over the peak of the work mountain in time for today.  It should be easier for me to make more progress on this page in this coming week with the lineart out of the way but I did just need a bit of rest so I should be good to continue.

Since I mostly just did lineart today I'll share a little bit about the hows and whys of that aspect of my work.  I've mentioned in the past how I try to maintain a balance between lineart and coloring, where one of these features should take the lead and the other should support it to prevent the art from being a visual mess if both elements are complex and keep it from looking unfinished if neither is strong.  Since I work with a lot of complex lighting and modeling in my paints I keep my lineart nice and simple, containing major shapes to keep things looking sharp and clean.  I crank up the details inside those lines, so they're mostly there as a supporting element.  

One of the other aspects about my lineart is I draw it to help make my character silhouettes distinct.  Because I work in greyscale it is very easy for elements of my comic to get lost if I'm not careful, so the way I use line weight in my inks helps try to keep my shapes clear, rather than use it to denote depth and contour.  The way I do this is through multiple passes with different brush weights.  I'll start out inking my pencils with a fine line pen, and when I'm done with a panel I'll go back again with a pen that has about 2x line weight to go over the outline silhouette for all my figures.  This way, the thickest lines in my lineart are the ones that block out a figure's shape in a panel.  After this I'll go through with a mid-weight pen and hit interior details, any big shapes that could stand out a bit more like jawlines or hairlines or clothing seams, with thicker lines than the initial pass, but thinner lines than the major silhouettes.  This works to create a hierarchy of shapes within my figures, and then when I come in to do my paint jobs I can flesh those shapes out into 3D.  You can see the effect of the big outlines on this page in particular, since there's so much figure overlap, everyone is clearly defined- or, at least I hope they are.

Anyways, that's a little bit on my linework.  I had a lot of it this time but in contrast my backgrounds are planned to be extremely simple so I should have a downhill work schedule painting this all up this week.  I have some fun gamedev news to report this week as well so keep an eye out for that writeup coming in a few.  Thanks!