Comic Report #96.1 - Illuminating

Hello! We're back again with this week's work report.  I got a fair bit of work done on the page this week, and I expect I can get the rest of it finished this weekend or like Monday or Tuesday at the latest, so you can expect the update to be ready sooner rather than later.  

First though, some other news: last weekend we got the last of our website housekeeping done.  We cleaned up a few stray security gaps in our new https:// configuration, and I went through and cleaned up the Links section of the page for the first time in a long while!  A lot of old links had succumb to link rot, so I cleaned it out and built it with a new arrangement- some old friends, some new faces! 

There's a mix of comics and indie game links now but everything should bring you somewhere enjoyable.  There's also now a link to the minicomics on the front page so that can be easier to find.  Anyways please click as many of the buttons as you'd like and check out some other works!

Regarding the current in-progress page: this week I managed to ink the page and paint it up through the most stressful part of the layout.  That archive shot in panel 3 was very tedious but I managed it by breaking it up into a few layers.  All the boxes on the shelves, the open drawers, the folders on top of the middle file cabinets were all blocked in on a separate layer so I could paint the depth and lighting more freely, and then select and paint those elements to match it.  This panel is tedious but it is something I love to do in the comic, rendering depth and space with a fixed light source.  I'll often think of the light as like a voluminous liquid emanating from its source, like so:

The focal point of the light is Monday's flashlight, and then all the other facets and details in the room are painted with this in mind.  I sort of wing it and keep it organic, but I'll imagine where my light is "flowing" and cast shadows accordingly.  There's some little shadow details I need to clean up but getting this panel out of the way means the rest of the page should be 1000x easier to wrap up.  

I'll be back to the grindstone this weekend so keep an eye out for the textless page update.  There isn't planned to be very much actual text here but I will still be posting it for you.  Thanks for your patient support of my work, I'll be back again soon.  Until then, take it easy.