Comic Report #103.1 - Design Time

Hello again!  As promised, this week I worked entirely on getting the comic done, and I'm pretty close to having it ready to go.  I expect I should have this page done this weekend, probably some time tomorrow evening.  I think last page writeup I talked about painting night scenes and how I like to paint lighting, so instead of writing about that today I'll talk a little bit about character designs.

Lou hasn't been in the main focus of the story for a bit but we have seen him somewhat recently, back at the page 600 moment reintroducing the Omni-Mart crew.  He hasn't been off the radar entirely, though, as he's been actively being developed on the game half of the project, and that's where a few character design changes have been cooked up and leaked back into the main comic.  So to start, there was his original color palette:

Lou's design has always been envisioned as him wearing a Carhartt style work jacket and a canvas baseball cap, like my old mechanic boss used to wear.  He had a dark shirt on under his jacket because I gave everyone dark undershirts, it made their collars pop more.  Looking in my archive for color-color reference for this I have an old valentines day piece of art that conveys what I'm thinking.

I imagined it like a dark brown jacket with a light collar, a tan cloth cap and khaki work pants.  In game colors I originally imagined most characters as wearing brown, except for Alice who had the most colorful outfit of all:

This was an older print I'd made, and you can see here Lou still has that darker jacket with a lighter collar.  Everyone wearing primarily brown isn't really a viable approach to making good distinct and readable game character designs, so as I started to get through the initial pencil sketch phases of the game art and got closer to needing to implement color, I had to really make sure I had my color designs nailed down.  And that was where Lou's design took some turns.

Everyone now has an assigned color, and Lou ends up in a nice earthy green.  Each character's color palette is now based on a Primary and Secondary Shirt color, and for Lou that ended up being his coat is the primary and his collar is the darker secondary color.  It looked better this way than the reverse way and more closely matched actual Carhartt jacket designs, so his color values ended up somewhat inverted.  This was reflected in his re-emergence around page 600.

Now in the shift back to greyscale his collar is darker than his coat, because that's how it looks in-game.  There was actually another design change to his coat that wasn't reflected here, which shows up in the current page.  Lou and Alice are the two characters whose primary shirt colors are the majority body if their shirt, but I wanted to differentiate them a bit so they had more distinct color shapes from each other.  So a very very minor design change was made:

I'd originally only really had Secondary Shirt as Lou's jacket collar, but what I did was I also added it to his coat sleeve cuffs and bottom hem.  This sort of distributes that darker value more and caps off the ends of his coat to help it feel more like outerwear compared to Alice's big nurse hoodie.  It's a little thing but it ends up making a difference and, like everything else, winds up back in the comic.

Two other changes that show up here:  Earlier Lou had a dark undershirt, now he has a light undershirt.  The reason for this is because our game sprites use a strict 32-color palette, and I don't really have a tertiary shirt color, so I need to be creative. There is an accent color but that is used for his shirt logo and zipper, so what I ended up doing was sampling the color from his harness belt buckle, which doesn't get used anywhere else but that one little rectangle, and used that for his shirt color.  It was an efficiency choice, but it also meant an additional change to his color value distribution was made.  Light shirt under a dark color has a nice pop to it so it's a good change overall.  

The other major change I made to Lou's design was his hat.  It switched from the canvas buckle-back to a mesh snapback, and there's a few major reasons for this.  One was, since his bean eyes didn't really use a lot of white his design just overall lacked the white that shows up in everyone else's eyes, so having white as the mesh back makes his face design brighter.  Another reason was it helps show that little bit of hair sticking down from the snapback loop; since you can change skin and hair colors in the game Lou needed a way for his hair color choices to be more visible, so now it peeks out from underneath the cap.  The last and kind of most unfortunate reason for the design change is because I wanted to give Alice and Lou red hair accessories like Lizzie and Monday have, so the whole team is unified together.  That was a long overdue change I ended up committing to for the page 600 day change scene, but since my work takes so long to do in the intervening time the idea of an all-red snapback became extremely undesirable.  Lou's old solid-color cloth cap would have been stuck looking like that, and I actually have some very old color palette mockups from when I was designing some possible alternate outfit colors for the game:

This was probably the specific point where I was like, hell no, I'm not doing Lou like that.  So making the change to a mesh snapback both solved the no bright whites problem and also made it so that, since the white is its own part of the color palette, it can't really be edited back to solid color again.  It's a minor thing but it enabled me to actually go forward with giving the whole team the red accent.  He's even got a specific design on the front of it to help nail down the design.

So anyways, that's a bit of a long story, but that's the long road to why Lou is painted a bit differently from how he used to be painted prior to the page 600 scene change.  He's back in the main focus so all his little changes are coming back into the comic in full force.  I'm honestly just not shy about changing designs as I go, I think that's the best way to help them evolve, and I thought this little journey through my thought process would be a bit more interesting than another post about lighting. 

As mentioned above I'm expecting to have this page basically finished this weekend so keep an eye out for the textless version to be posted shortly.  Until then, it's back to the grindstone for me.