Comic Report #98.1 - Imperfections

Hello again!  I had a pretty rough week this week, and as the title of this week's post implies it was largely a combination of Daylight Savings, a now-earlier appointment and a broken smoke detector that blasted me out of my rhythm for about three days out of this week.  I didn't get as much progress done on the comic as I had hoped and I apologize for that.  I did, however, make a lot of headway on gamedev sprite colorization and some other sprite work for my day job, the former of which I'll be posting about after this update goes up.  

One of the aspects of my comic that, if the Discord chats are anything to go by, a lot of people pick up on is the way I've drawn weapon designs.  All the firearms in the comic sit in this sort of in-between space of being on-model and abstracted at the same time.  Cars end up in this space as well- this is probably rooted in my own upbringing as an artist.  I grew up in a farming town and in the house I was raised in guns were present and very normalized.  I was always shown how they work, taught how to handle them safely and informed of the consequences if I ever got caught  breaking those safety rules, so this deeper knowledge of how the moving metal parts fit together and how people handle them have been baked into me from a very early age.  We also repaired everything far beyond the point where someone else might just buy a replacement, jury-rigging things together to extend their service life as long as possible.  A lot of this background is where Lou as a character came from, the way he is with things is just the way things were in my home.

About machines in the comic, I'll often pull up references to make sure I have my details correct but I generally won't go to the effort of trying to draw them exactly precise.  It's one of my beliefs as an artist that flaws give things character, and by observing details and letting my own hand imperfectly render things on paper it gives the art a more interesting quality to it than if I traced a 3D render of a machine.  I know -how- things work and how the parts fit together, I just don't think the specific dimensions of those parts are necessarily important to conveying the idea of the thing I'm drawing.  It doesn't have to be perfect to be interesting.

I should actually have a lot more progress on this page by next Friday, barring any other cosmic shifts in time, and as mentioned I'll have a gamedev writeup coming up after this post goes up.  Thank you, as always, for your kind patience for my work.  Until next time, take care.