Comic Report #119.1 - The Little Windows (Patreon)

Another Friday is upon us and I've got some work progress to share with you.  It's the 27th, I've got five days until my work deadline and I think from where I'm at right now I can hit that easy enough- there is a hiccup I'm anticipating but I'll go into that in a minute.  I've been juggling work on the comic and game sprite animation for my dayjob on Kitsune Tails, but Dead Winter game art is on hold until I get this page wrapped up.  There's so much to do!  But I persist regardless.  

Painting has been moving pretty straightforward.  This page is an interior shot of a low-light environment with a single, soft light source, so it's fun to compose the lighting for a scene like this.  The light source is outside, but it's also dark outside, so I render the light source as a darkened window, which I think gives the scene a bit of a mood.  And rather than painting in a dark scene and dropping in a light shape from the window, or painting a light scene and blocking out darks with a dark layer, I like to paint the shadow shapes around the light shapes, giving the edge between the two fields a sort of imperfection that makes the light feel warmer and more, intangible?  I don't know the word, but I know the feeling I'm looking for.  Painting the dark and light fields together so at their border they form the ideas of shapes in the space around a column of light.  That's what I'm doing.

I'd mentioned a potential hiccup on the horizon: the next task for me to complete will be blocking in five background panels of the same shot to close out the page.  I don't know what it is about me but I have always struggled with repetition, it feels tedious and my mind wanders when I get caught up in it, so having to paint basically the same background shot five times is going to be a bit of a pain.  I think I said this on the last page, in fact, which also closed out with five of the same background shot.  Repetition indeed!  Mercifully, this background is a wall, a window and some bedding, so it's a lot less tedious than buildings, depth of field and skylines.  I'll be fine.  That will probably be my tonight and tomorrow project.

So that's where I'm at for now.  The backgrounds for the first two panels are really cleanly blocked in, I expect finalizing those on the second pass should be easy enough.  I'm expecting to hit my mark at the usual time, or preferably before the 31st so I can vibe and enjoy Halloween this year.  You'll be hearing from me again soon, so until then, have a pleasant weekend and a happy Halloween of your own!