Comic Report #95.1 - Process

Hello again! This has been a busy week for me, I feel like I got a lot done but I also didn't get enough done.  From the top: I did a lot of cleanup on the comic's archive page, which had been neglected for a long time.  http://www.deadwinter.cc/archive  All of the minicomics are now archived here, along with supplemental extras like the Reckless Hold 'Em rules or the guest character guide to the Survivor's Convention.  I also fixed up some missing assets in the Dead Winter guest comics, so there's a lot to click there now.

Additionally, one of the other projects I've been working on released a major update this week.  I've been working as the lead pixel artist on a game called Kitsune Tails, and we just released a trailer featuring the voice actor lineup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqhz5PHtwGg Consider giving this a watch if you have a chance!

The bad news for this week is I lost a lot of time to sleep problems.  I've got this thing, like a non-24 hour situation, where I'll slowly end up rolling around the clock and eventually need to just hard reset my sleep cycle.  I'd fallen into a place where my sleeping hours were the same as the post office's operating hours, which isn't good for mailing stuff out, so I lost three days this week trying to get myself back on track, which I think I've succeeded at.  Anyways, the short story is I only really got the inks for the next page done this week, but I do have a fun story to tell about them!

So as the archives may attest, I like to make adjustments to the way I make comics fairly often, usually at the start of a new chapter.  If I think something will work better I'll just try it.  What I've felt for the past few pages was that my backgrounds weren't clear enough.  I'd just painted them in behind my character art for a while.  After drawing in all the backgrounds in the last three intermission pages I thought I'd try incorporating lineart into my backgrounds for the new chapter and see if it sharpens things up a bit.  I'll also be seeing if this speeds up or slows down my process.

The way I'm handling this new process change is by keeping the background lineart on a separate layer behind my character lineart.  One of the reasons I'd generally not use background lines is so the characters pop more from being the ones with the darkest outline and standing out as more distinct than the background.  By keeping my lineart separate I can lighten it, recolor it or erase it if I need to.  This is a fairly simple page with a lot of little background details so it'll be a good testbed to try this new process out on.

My sleep cycle is corrected, I think, so this week I should make more actual progress on the comic page.  Thank you for your patience this week, once this page goes up there should be some fun waiting in this new chapter.  Have a pleasant weekend, and I'll be back on track with more to share next Friday!