Comic Report #122.1 - Early Start (Patreon)

It's Friday again and I've got a progress shot on my comic page for you.  I'm real glad I started this one early, I don't feel too pressured leading up to the end of the month- my posting deadline- and I think the lighting and the final composition is gonna look real nice.  This week I put a bit of time into working on assets for Kitsune Tails (that is this project: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1325260/Kitsune_Tails/ if you're new to the blog) and we outlined our goals for finalizing the core of Dead Winter's arcade game.  Our goal is to have a playable build at Combo Breaker in Chicago, if you're planning to attend let me know so you can try it out.  Things have been busy, so I'm glad I got started on this comic early.  

The lighting on this page has been a lot of fun to play around with.  There's a lot of tight spaces and a very strong light source being pointed in all kinds of directions, so when I get to the background pass in the first and second panels I'm in for a real treat.  Strong lighting has been one of my favorite parts about working on this comic over the years, so anytime a scene is dark I'm just in art painting heaven.  I think of the lighting in a really liquid sense, imagining it flowing from its light source, imagining how it strikes surfaces and how it is obstructed- it makes a scene feel really spatial and 3D, which I think is a strength of the comic, and this page will be no exception.

As the comic has progressed the characters have all accumulated a collection of scars and injuries that have persisted, and I've always tried to keep a mental track of where those scars are and where they came from.  Lizzie being as she is in the most recent few pages has been a good reason to check the archives for how I drew her in previous pages, particularly her legs.  I know she had one leg that was a bit more scuffed than the other, and since she was in a car wreck I think it was the leg working the gas pedal.  She has seatbelt burns on her left collarbone and her right lumbar, which is easy to remember because she's driver's side in America, but for this page I had to consider how the backs of her legs worked.  If she was sitting down in her car then her cuts and scars would mostly be on the tops of her legs?  I think that makes sense?  So the backs of her thighs are probably fine, and her calves might be a bit more cut.  Unrelated, but this is probably going to be the last of these pages where the first panel that gets posted as the teaser preview is quite so teasy.  They've been fun to draw but it's about time to get down to business.

That'll be it for this week.  I'm gonna focus on getting this comic page done in time, although I have ample time on the clock I'm not gonna slack on it, because February is a short month where I'm gonna have a big challenge on my hands so I want to come into it prepared.  I should have a bigger post about my current Dead Winter Arcade Game task ready for next week too (it's applying color to modular background painting), so please look forward to that.  For now, though, I'm gonna get back to it.  Thanks for checking in, and have a nice weekend!