Comic Report #115.2 - A Light Dusting

I've finally got to the end of the comic page and I finally have a textless version to share with you.  I'm slightly ahead of schedule by a day or so, which is nice; I also get to try out a new Discord remote update notification feature which I'm excited to get to, so I'll keep this brief as always and put some text to this page asap.

I think I slightly underestimated what I needed to do to render "accumulating snow" in monochrome black & white.  The amount of snow I'd planned for was like, not really crunch-crunch deep, but light enough that you could still see road lines through it, like it's building up.  I'd blocked in the buildings in the first panel using the darker values I'd been using for nighttime Tombstone, but it took me a little bit of fussing and planning on how to achieve the snowy look I wanted.  One of the tricks was to blur the edge of the sidewalk dipping into the road a bit, and then also faintly drawing in the lines on the road, so while the whole palette was lighter those details were still there to show there hasn't been full-covering accumulation yet- it took me a day of painting to figure out but I think I got there.

The effect on the drifting snowflakes I'm mostly happy with as well.  What I aimed to do here was minimize the presence of the stars in the sky and paint in snowflakes using three brush sizes- a big one for a few up-close flakes, a medium sized one and a small one for many far-away flakes, to give the snow drift a sense of depth.  They compete with the stars a little so I de-emphasized the sky to put the focus on the flakes, and I think I got the effect I'm looking for.  

Now that everything's in place I'm gonna hop to it and cover those snowflakes with word balloons.  Believe it or not we managed another big gamedev achievement while I'd been working on this comic page, so gamedev patrons will have something nice to look forward to on Friday.  Until then, thanks for reading!