Comic Report #109.3 - Almost There

So my holiday rest is over an this week I went all in trying to get this page wrapped up before the 7th, since the last page went up December 7th and I try not to stray over those one-month lines.  I made a bit of progress on the gamedev front this week- I got Alice's new muzzle flash ranged attack effects set up- but I focused almost entirely on comic work.  I'm gonna save the gamedev report for next week so I can a) have a more comprehensive milestone to share and b) spend more time tonight wrapping up this page.  For now though, here's what I got:

Last week I posted a background block-in where I made the walls white, which felt like a reflexive decision more than anything, and as I was typing up my report I noticed and said I'd put in those 90's style wood panel walls, since that would complete the atmosphere more fully.  I did that and it really worked out great, the whole room feels like a dad zone now, which was the feeling I wanted to capture in the first place.  Big fan, gonna keep this wall style in my back pocket for later use.

I let myself cheat a little bit on this page.  Rather than redraw the whole Scarlet & Herringbone book cover I kinda lifted it from a previous page, skewed it and painted over it to get it to look kinda okay at this angle.  I wanted to convey it's the same book from before but I'm also pushing to hit this deadline of getting this page in before I fall down the AGDQ hole.

When I went through doing my initial painting pass on this page I put a bit more time than normal into pre-rendering the backgrounds. I usually block in rough shapes and general values so I can get the right amount of contrast in painting my foreground subjects, but I know this room is meant to be crowded and full of capital-s Stuff so I gave it a bit more polish before I proceeded, and that should make my work tonight and tomorrow a lot easier.  It's much easier to flesh out a half-built thing than try to build the thing from scratch, so we'll see how well that goes for me.

If all goes according to plan you should be seeing another post on here from me sometime tomorrow with the textless page art.  Thanks for being patient with me, I'm really juggling a lot of chainsaws lately between the comic, the game and the other game (Kitsune Tails, it's wishlistable on Steam!).  I'm jumping back on the grindstone so wish me luck!