Comic Report #20.1 - Interior, Crocodile, etc (Patreon)

Here's a progress shot of the next comic.  I'm going to keep working on this and I should have it finished by the end of the week, and then I'll switch back to a gameweek afterwards, but I'd like to just push this through to the end as seems to have become my system.

I alternate between preferring interior and exterior scenes, always yearning for the opposite of what I'm working on.  I've just moved into an interior scene, though, which means I'm still doing the thing I was yearning to do.  Exterior shots can be easy if the sky is a big part of the shot, since skies are broad and organic, easy to blotch in with a loose brush.  

The difficulty in exteriors comes from their infinite depth and all the geometry you have to draw connected to the ground, especially when it's something like a city shot.  Trees and organic landscape are by nature chaotic, "mistakes" in their construction are not read as errors but instead as just natural variation in what the scene your rendering can be, and in fact enhance the details.  By contrast, man-made structures are rigid and mathematical, built out of straight lines and calculated angles. When you draw a building all of its parallel lines are dictated by the perspective of the camera, they have to be exact in a way where variation is unnatural and actually detracts from your scene.  When I draw my exteriors I don't adhere to strict gridlines and instead prefer to bend my perspective- this both lets me hide mistakes in my unmeasured perspective and also gives the eye a sense of scope when it wanders around a panel, seeing more from below when it looks a the top of a building and curving back to flat lines at eye level.  Regardless, exterior shots are complex and take me a long time to do.

Interior shots, on the other hand, are contained little worlds where walls and ceilings are close enough that you don't have that infinite depth to have to account for. They're like building dioramas, which is a lot of fun, but sometimes you miss that freedom of a big sky overhead. My absolute favorite thing about interior shots, however, is the restricted light sources.  Windows or lamps or TV sets or phones or flashlights or whatever, when there's only one or two light sources and everything else is boxed in with walls you can create absolutely lovely modeling in light and shadow, which is one of my absolute favorite things to paint.  This page, the page before it and the couple pages to follow will be full of limited light source scenes in small confined rooms so they should, and have thus far, take me less time to finish so for a while I should be updating more often.

I'm gonna get back to knocking these last panels out, look for a finished update by the weekend.  Thanks for reading!