Comic Report #111.1 - One Week More (Patreon)

These past two weeks or so I've been going pretty hard trying to knock out some gamedev tasks and get over a hill but this week I wanted to get back on task for comics, so today I have page progress to share with you.  I'm expecting I can have this page finished for next week so there should be another update with the textless page before this time next Friday.  I'll often stress about not making comics as fast as I want to but I gotta do what I gotta do so I'll try not to sweat it too much.  Either way, I had a hot gamedev streak so it's comic page time until this thing is posted.

Jumping between Dead Winter the Comic and Dead Winter the Game is always a bit of an art shock just from how different each of the art rendering processes is for me, especially now that I'm colorizing game sprites.  The programs I use respectively for each project are Clip Studio Paint and Aseprite, my process is similar between the two but different to reflect the ways each tool works.  The process I use to make Dead Winter art has evolved over the years and now that I'm thinking about it it's kinda fun to see that it's more or less reflected in how I'm making game sprites.

The main process of rendering art in Dead Winter the Comic goes:  lay out pencils, do a first pass of thin-line inks, do a second pass of bolder inks, paint in flat tones on a layer beneath the inks, ctrl-click the flat tone layer to highlight it and then paint my greys.  The second pass to bolden the inks is important to help the art pop more, and keep my lines really neat and precise to frame the painting I'm doing.  I'd thought about if my process would go faster by just painting thicker lines but I feel like I might lose the thin end of the scale if I do that, but it might be worth exploring to shave a step off the process.  Painting on an underneath layer is useful because my inks in Clip Studio Paint are kinda fuzzy and antialiased so having greys go beneath the lineart means my painting goes beneath that layer of semitranslucent pixels created around each line and helps sell the appearance of the art being smooth.  

When I'm working on Dead Winter the Game my process for making a sprite is a bit different from this.  I'll still start with pencils for all my frames and then begin with a first pass of thin-line inks using a 1-pixel brush, but after that pass I'll go through and flat tone my sprites by paint bucketing colors from my palette into the same layer as the lineart.  Since I am working in hard-edge pixels there's no fuzzy outer edge of my lineart to work with, I don't need to underpaint my flats beneath my lineart, I can save a lot of time just filling in my shapes.  The downside of this method is pixel gaps- if even one pixel of gap is present my paint bucket will spread outside the shape I want it in so I'll have to scan the lines and go gap hunting.  The reason I flat color at this stage is because using the 1-pixel brush leaves the fewest little one- or three-pixel corner gaps for me to paint bucket, which cuts out a lot of tedium.  After the flats are down I'll go back over my art with a 3-pixel brush to do a second pass on the lineart.  Initially we tried to see what one-pixel lineart looked like and our sprites didn't look great, so a nice meaty line helps give the lineart character.  Just like working on the comics, having a thin-line pass and then accenting with thick strokes helps me preserve the precision end of my inking while I bolden my figures with the thicker lines.  The thick line intersections will often create a lot of those little corner gap pockets, but since my flats are already laid down it's easier to manage.  After the thick lineart is in place I'll magic wand one color at a time and paint in the shadow and highlight colors, just like I do with my comics.  

Jumping back from the Game process to the Comic process is a lot of fun because the comic lines are so much smoother, after I'd been living in the jagged pixel world for too long it feels a bit jarring to be drawing the same character and not have their lines look crunchy and raw.  This week that's essentially what I've been doing, after living in the crunch I'm shifting back into smoothsville and enjoying the shift between planes.

I'm planning to have this page done for next week so keep an eye out for that update after this weekend.  I do have some more gamedev work cooking, as above, but I'll save that for a post after this next page is up.  Thanks for sticking with me on these projects!  Until next time, have a nice weekend.