Comic Report #114.1 - Soft Light (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I've been sick with a kind of perpetual snot disease so I just focused on working through the next comic page. I'll switch back to gamedev stuff after the page is done, and I'm kind of expecting to have this page finished either at the end of the weekend or the beginning of next week, so that should be coming up in next Friday's report.  For now, though, here's what I've been doing this week!

Over this week I hit the milestone of getting my pencils inked, flatted and mostly painting my figures, which is good progress.  The inks for this page have been particularly tricky for how intertwined and entangled the characters are, trying to make sure I draw all their joints right.  All the elbows and wrists in particular needed a bit extra inking focus to get them looking good enough that a paint job can sell their 3Dness.  This is a very handsy page so I gotta work extra hard to get that right.  

The other major challenge of this page has been rendering soft light specifically.  In previous pages, both outdoors and indoors, I've been having some fun with very sharp light sourcing, very easy to just Do.  On this page I want to stage a room with some candlelights so the light is a lot warmer and gentler, which has involved a bit more modelling from me than usual.  To me, "soft" lighting involved a lot more rendering light as a sort of light blanket draping around a figure rather than hard beams of light striking their facets, there's a blending and an enveloping feel to the way lights and shadows are painted and that's the major difference I'm trying to make in how I'm rendering my figures.  It's been going a bit slower than usual, but I am confident I can get through in a reasonable amount of time and get the effect I'm looking for.

That's going to be it for now.  As mentioned, you'll probably hear from me again shortly as I wrap up this page and move into working on gamedev stuff for the week.  Thanks for checking in, and have a nice weekend!