Comic Report #106.2 - Word On The Street (Patreon)

The mHello!  I had hoped to make it all the way to the end of this page this week, but I only made it to almost-the-end.  That's fine, though, since I can get this finished up this weekend no problem; it's a six-panel comic and there's only four backgrounds left to paint, and one of them is a freebie so that's just three backgrounds to do before I'm home free.  There isn't a gamedev update this week since I really want to focus on getting this comic out, I'm over my one-month-in-between mark and I always get anxious around this time.  But for now, here's what I've been doing this week.

When I first drew Tombstone I had the letters on top of the newspaper building, the City Herald-Gazette, in a sort of serifed font.  In more recent pages I've thought it looked better in a sans-serif font, though, so it's one of those organic little details that just change in the comic.  I've thought about how that would work in-lore and I'm just like, well, have you ever misremembered something?  The sign's always been how it is now, I'm just misremembering it as looking different.  This comic's art has grown so much over the years mainly because I've never been shy about just drawing something in a better way if I felt like it's an improvement, so that's just a very minor piece of that line of practice.  

I'm looking forward to working on this third panel background just for the specific lighting situation I have set up.  The shot is of the characters walking down the street, but the main light source is a flood lamp in the left of the foreground, so if I do my lighting calculations correctly what I should end up with is dark foreground buildings contrasting a light little valley of concrete, with the characters' shadows stretching behind them.  It's like if light was a fluid, if you filled a bathtub with light and peeked in at it from over the ridge of the tub, that's the exciting effect I've got planned to work on, so hopefully before this weekend is up I'll have that to share with you.

That last panel is probably going to be the part that I spend the most time on, because I'll be painting in a background based on a background I've referenced previously but never fully fleshed out.  It's right here:

The major features of this background include:

- The steam-electric power generator on the left.
- The big crane on the right, which sneaks into the background of a number of shots throughout the Tombstone arc of the comic
- The warehouse with the big number painted on the side.  This number shows up in the kissing scene pages so I'll have to check back there to remember what I painted on there.

The fence in the foreground is the point Lou is gesturing towards in that last panel, so I gotta fudge things a bit with the crane position to make sure it looks nice.  This is a restricted area, being somewhat dangerous, but it's where Marty Mulgrave- supposed partner of Ethel Mulgrave, whose name appeared in the bookplate of a book found inside the bus that one of the old ladies says she saw someone sneak out of the night of the Sheriff's murder- hangs out, so the girls are lucky to have their good friend Lou as a man on the inside to lead them in to see him.  Unfortunately, Lou is very overly-generous with his love of sharing things with his friends and there's So Many Cool Things in the power generation site, and he's gonna want to show Lizzie and Alice allllllll about his workplace!  As soon as I get this page done I can have fun drawing that one.

That's it for this week's report!  As mentioned, I'm expecting to have this thing wrapped up this weekend, so please look forward to the textless page post soon. Thank you as always for your patient support of my work.  There will be more big gamedev updates once this comic is in the tank, so gamedev friends keep an eye out for that in the coming week.  Until then, have a nice weekend!