Comic Report #107.2 - Steam Powered (Patreon)

Hello again and welcome to November.  I've just got a comic page again as I try to hack through rendering this steam engine and get this page posted online sooner than later- I'm expecting to have this page finished over the weekend so you can expect to see the textless page posted here in the days to come.  

I am mostly through painting all the engines on this page but it's been a bit more of a pain than I expected it to be.  It's all the little facets, I think, that make it tedious to render.  To get it feeling like its made of reclaimed metal it needs just the right amount of reflected light in its shadow sides- that is, painting in the bright highlight spots, then adding in the shadow fields, then going back in over the shadows with a slightly lighter paintbrush to warm up the undersides of a plane.  I got one more of these to go and then I'm basically home free.

When I painted in panel 3's diagram I added a bunch of bright lines to help convey the different kinds of energy involved.  One of the little things I tried to achieve was in the turbine chamber I wanted to gradually darken the arrows and the dotted lines coming from the water boiler to represent the steam losing heat and sinking to the bottom of the tank.  So far I haven't gotten any notices about the mechanics of the steam engine not working right so I think I did alright conveying how this homemade power generator works.

That's what I got so far. I'm gonna work on getting this thing wrapped up tonight and tomorrow and maybe into Sunday depending on how the background phase goes, but it should be out the door soon.  Thanks for sticking with me.  Gamedev stuff will resume once this page is done, then I'll be starting Monday's gunslinging attack animations!  Very exciting!  Until then, take it easy.