Comic Report #110.1 - Breathing Room (Patreon)

It is Friday, which means Patreon gets to look at work in progress.  I didn't get the next page quite as far as I'd like to have but I pushed it close enough to the background pass phase that I expect to have it done sometime at the end of this weekend or at the start of next week.  The past few updates I'd been trying to not go over my one-month mark on the 7th but I think I should be far enough ahead of schedule that that should not be a concern this time.  I also got a little bit of a gamedev report to share with the games people too coming up after this post so stick around for that to come as well!

The hard part about establishing a new scene is drawing in the backgrounds for the first time, but once that's done it's pretty smooth sailing afterwards.  The first time you go through you gotta set everything up, find all the value balance to make things pop right, pick out the arrangement of stuff to convey the atmosphere you're going for, so on and so on.  The first time you have to conjure the location from your own imagination or cobble it together from your collection of references, but after you get that done the place is established and you now have a more complete reference to build off of.  For this reason I sometimes feel like the first time I draw a recurring scene, i.e. the Jade Garden interior, it looks way nicer than the subsequent times I draw it, where I kind of bang it out.  I'm going to give this background my best shot but already I kinda just blocked it in with rough pencils and didn't worry too much about the fine details from the first time, I'll get it feeling like the same place in my second background pass.

In this middle phase of a comic I can sometimes feel like I drew the page a little emptier than I should have.  I like to put as much meat on the bone of an update as I can, but it's important to remember for myself that I need room to put word bubbles in in the final phase of the comic process, because for whatever reason I don't like covering up my character art with word bubbles so I am always spacing them around the focal characters.  I need some room to convey the plot I outlined in last week's report and I've accounted for that space, I just need to remind myself it doesn't feel "empty", the elements I accounted for haven't been added yet.

That's about what I got to share today.  I expect I can have this thing finished and posted sooner than later so you can expect to hear from me again soon.  I'm going to get back to grinding to try and push that sooner more soon than later, so until then, be well out there.