Comic Report #97.1 - Drawing The Line

Hello again!  It's a snowy Friday and I have a ton of write-up to share with you.  This week that's going to mostly be the gamedev article, though, as we hit a pretty major breakthrough in our development.  This article might be a bit more brief but the gamedev one will make up for it.

A lot of this week was spent inking this page.  Inking is usually the most meticulous part of the process and this page just has a whole lot of bodies in it to account for.  One of the hard things about inking is it's important to get it just right, it's a finalization of the sketch phase in a way that is going to impact the whole rest of the process.  "A good drawing can save bad painting, but good painting can't save a bad drawing", was a quote from an old professor of mine, and I feel like that applies in this process as well.  I think the inks here came out strong so painting shouldn't be too much of a challenge, the backgrounds aren't overly-complicated, which is usually a potential timesink as well.  

I'd been reading through the older parts of my comic again recently.  I haven't done this in years because looking at my old art past a certain point is a bit like playing a guitar into your own amp, the feedback from seeing my own old artwork has just kept me from going through it.  Part of this story arc has been sort of forcing myself to go back and re-read the super early stuff, like the double-digit stuff, to keep track of the pieces I've been working to contextualize better.  On rereads I will sometimes pick out words or phrasing that the me from 2007 or 08 had written that the me from today doesn't quite agree with, so I'm not above going back and editing the archive to clean it up a bit.  The me who made comics for 15 years is the best editor the me who was starting to make comics could have and I didn't exist yet back then so I'm dealing with it now.  If you ever reread the archive and something seems different slightly from how you remember it, this is why.  

One plus side of going through the old art again is picking up on how I was painting some of the middle-old stuff, the 300-ish pages, and how strong the contrasts in darks and highlights were.  I think my recent art has kind of condensed the contrast a bit to be somewhat softer, so I'm inspired to try to pull the contrast out again too.  I also remembered how I used to render hair, painting it in longer strands and less as a solid shape, so I'm trying to incorporate some of that back into the current artwork as well.  If there's a scene to do it, this is the one, because this one reaches so far back it makes sense aesthetically, and then when the story continues afterwards it'll just be how it is.  

I feel like I should be able to get this page finished in this next upcoming week.  There are some reflections in the elevator mirror which should be more fun than tedious to paint, but aside from the lobby shot it should be easy peasy painting the figures all the way through.  Thank you as always for your patient support, I will be back hopefully with a finished page to share shortly.  Until then, be well.