Comic Report #109.1 - A Bit More Detail (Patreon)

Happy Holidays!  This week's update is a bit more time on last week's update- I spent a lot of this week hitting some animation milestones for Kitsune Tails (I wish I could share what I do on that but sooner than later you'll get to see it) so I couldn't make it to the ink and flat tone phase for today.  I did, however, flesh out my vision for Marty Mulgrave's office, and I gotta say I've landed myself into a bit of a pickle here.  I wanted to capture an authentic feeling of the cramped worksite trailer office and I think I achieved that, but now I'm gonna have to paint this background in every panel for a few pages!  Ahhhh!  I'm not gonna worry about that too much right now, though.  It's the holiday weekend so I'm going to take some time to rest and I'll get digging in on the inkwork for this page when I can.  

One of the fun details about Dead Winter is I started writing it in 2007 but the bulk of its life has happened in the 2010s, so it takes place ambiguously in that specific decade, and a cool thing about the 2010s was it saw a transition from CRTs to flat screens, so when I'm drawing environmental details I can choose to have, say, a big flat screen like Liz and Alice have at their place, or I can put in a big chunky CRTs on one of those crummy workstations like Marty has here, and those are all things we had in 2010.  Sticking a CRT on the workstation adds a bit of character to Marty just by being there, like it pins him to one side of 2010 over the other.  

Another specific detail I wanted to put in Marty's office was the little wooden sign on his desk.  At my old mechanic job we had the same one- it was a wooden circle screwed onto a wooden plaque, and it said something like "This is a round Tuit, for the next time you say you want to get one" as a really corny "I'll get around to it > do your job now" kind of piece of workshop decor.  Well, Marty has one of those on his desk, and I wonder if anyone else will recognize the round Tuit.

That's it for the moment.  I have a gamedev writeup to share after this post but once I'm done typing I'm going to relax a bit, it's been a busy year for me.  Thank you very kindly for sticking with me throughout this project.  I'll have one more post to share before the new year, so until then, have a restful holiday yourself as well.