Comic Report #112.1 - Focal Point (Patreon)

Okay, so!  This week I had planned to put the comic as my central work focus, but right at the start of the week we hit on an enormous milestone in our gamedev project, so I put a lot of time into stabilizing that so I could focus on the comic again.  I recognize that if some creative thing gets stuck in my head and I try to focus on something else I end up distracted doing that other thing, so I just fed the gamedev thing while it was sitting like a hot coal on my mind until I could get it all hacked out and under control- gamedev patrons will have a fun treat after this article goes up!  I did manage to get the comic page to the "all downhill from here" phase, though, so this week I for sure should be able to focus entirely on getting the comic done before the end of the month.  For now, though, here's a couple paragraphs on my thought process moving towards the end of this page.

When I was laying out the inks I thought about how I wanted to present Nathan Mulgrave in this page, how to gradually ease him into the shot.  You can see in panel four that I didn't ink him in just yet, I left him as pencils.  My plan is in the first shot he's kinda hidden behind the doorframe I'm gonna paint him in as an indistinct silhouette so as the panels progress he becomes more and more clear.  This should pair well with my plan for how to handle dialogue, which I think I touched on a bit last week but I'll have a better explanation for once the page is at the dialogue phase itself.  But my central focus for this page is the fading-in of the third Mulgrave.

The other key effect I wanted to achieve here was Nathan Mulgrave aka Snake-Eye of the Gravekeepers looking directly into the camera with his one visible eye.  I'd struggled a bit with how to achieve this in pencils, but like anything else the art problem is more easily resolved in full proper paints.  What I did here was try to hyper-focus on Nate's eye by darkening everything else in the shot and cutting a bright wiggly white line behind his eye.  In painting his face I opted for the Morticia Addams method of lighting just the band across his eye and leaving the rest of him darkened.  To kinda help put the light source on his eye I painted up Marty Mulgrave with a strong frontal light source, as if Nate's eye was generating the light, this way the element of Marty in the shot also draws the reader's attention to the stare.  I want to get this shot right because I really want that penultimate panel to feel like he Sees who is watching him.  I think that would help set up the scenes to come.

That's where I'm at for now.  I'm gonna do my writeup for the gamedev progress this week but this time, certainly, this week I'll be riding this comic page downhill towards its conclusion, hopefully before the end of the month.  Until next time, thanks for checking in and have a great weekend.