Comic Report #68.2 - Third and Goal

Hello again! This week I made a pretty good push on getting this page painted and ready to post.  It's a bit of a process to create the look I want for my comics but it's fun to pause every Friday and see how it's coming together.  

Painting comics in this style is very labor intensive, so one of the practices I've adopted is to take it in two passes, an 80% pass and a final detail pass.  I have some quality about me where if I dwell on fine detail too long it puts a strain on my brain and I fatigue myself, so by breaking up the large task of painting into multiple passes I can get the final product I want to achieve more efficiently.  In the case of this page, long depth-of-field shots are probably the most taxing thing for me to draw, and this scene has been taking place at a nexus of multiple depth of fields with specific buildings in the background, which I have to reference for consistency, on top of having a crowd around the characters who I also need to keep track of, so it's just been a lot of mental CPU work ever since I started drawing page 600.  I've got about one more page to draw after this one before I can transition to the next scene, though, so I just need to hang in there a little longer, but in the meantime I'm blocking in the building shapes and I'll come back and clean them up on the final 20% pass.

A fun part of my process on these pages has been blobbing in the background characters.  Where I normally take a lot of care to ink and paint my primary characters, I'll just kinda block in the background crowd and paint them in lineless, and without as much lighting and modeling as my main subjects.  This helps the main subjects of a page stand out as being a bit more distinct, which can be tricky to do with just 256 shades of grey.  I kinda blobbed them in on the top panel, but I'll get to the others in my second pass on this page.

One of the other elements about this page that I'm pretty proud of is this shot right here. When it was just inks it was just three Lizzies in a rectangle, but now that I've blocked in the background you can see the real clever bit: in order to create a sequence of moments I've been using Lizzie's mop as a panel border!  The background is a shot down a street, but as the building in one "panel" reaches the next mop it cuts off and switches back to the long depth of field shot, three times for three panels.  I'm gonna have to blob in a couple Alices that vanish behind the mop handle but I think that might enhance the effect.  This is one where I'm excited to get to that second pass and flesh it out.

Since I have most of the foreground characters painted I'm more or less over the mountaintop for work on this page, I expect I can get the bottom panel blocked in tonight and then Saturday into Sunday morning I can have this page wrapped up and ready to post, so you can expect to see another textless update from me shortly.  Thank you, as always, for sticking with me through this project.  Be well, I'll see you again soon!