Comic Report #101.1 - What a Crowd

Hello again!  This week I put most of my time towards working on the next comic page.  We've been making progress on a new game feature but it'll take a little more time before it really comes together, so this week will just be a comic report while we flesh out the new game elements.  That's going to be a really cool update, but for today let's just talk about the comic page.

Between last week and this one I did a lot of cleanup on my character poses, though they mostly stayed intact.  The big detail I added since then was working out who got what kind of food and how to arrange them on Lizzie's serving tray.  Clark and Dale's orders are pretty simple, they just have a bowl of soup and a cup of tea each, but Amy and Mel's orders are callbacks to what they told Lizzie they wanted to eat back at the Omni-Mart:

Amy gets her double cheeseburger and Mel has her plate of chicken and rice.  It's a super minor detail but it would be something Lizzie remembered from their last encounter.

There's a lot of little details on this page so one of the ways I broke it down to make it easier to paint was to split my foreground flats layer into two, one for my figures and one for the food.  You can spot the difference by the lighter grey used for the food items- the reason I do this is so if I want to paint something beneath my lineart I can just ctrl+click that layer in my layers window and then I can be sure my paint strokes won't overwrite onto details I don't want them to.  I probably don't explicitly need to do this but it does let me go faster while keeping my shapes nice and clean so it's something I always do as a matter of habit, but I'm normally just doing it with one paint layer, but a second one is helpful for just focusing on painting all the food.

One of the fun parts about how this page turned out is the volume of characters on it, they all represent all different eras of the comic all in one place.  Aside from Lizzie, the constant, you have Sally working in the last panel bringing the dirty dishes back to the kitchen, there's the Omni-Mart crew who represent the middle part of the comic, there's Lee in the first panel representing the Tombstone arc and you've got Mr. Pibbsly, who only exists in the minicomics.  I'm happy with how the layout came out.

I want to get this page done as early as I can so I can possibly get the next page after it done in time to post during Pride Month- that's a bit of foreshadowing-  so we'll see what I can fit into the month of June.  Once I get through all the first-pass painting the rest of this comic should be easy to do, maybe I'll have it done this coming week?  I'll try to shoot for it.    I should have more gamedev news to share next week too.  Have a good weekend.