Comic Report #91.3 - Finally Here

Here it is at last, the textless final page of the chapter.  This one's been a bit harder for me for some reason so I'm happy to finally reach this point where I can breathe a little bit and let a complete chunk of story exist as-is.  It feels good to hit this point, like if someone were to find the comic for the first time there's a complete endpoint for them to land on after reading it all.

When pulling up references for that final shot I needed to look at what was over there past the section I've been painting in the recent pages, so I went back to page 516 to get the best reference so far.

This was a day-to-night fading shot, but for the scene now the sun is in the other direction so all the lighting on those background elements is coming from the other way.  I like to try to keep my backgrounds consistent so that places feel like living things as much as the characters so going back to reference them is always worth the headache.

Also, a fun detail emerged somewhat organically when painting this last panel: when I blocked in the buildings around Liz and Alice, I ended up blocking in a light-wall facet around Alice's dark hair, and a dark-wall facet around Lizzie's light hair.  This is a classic portrait painting technique, to darken the background around highlights and vice versa in order to create enough contrast to make your subject pop, and I wasn't consciously thinking about doing it here, but it just happened quite neatly and it really makes that last shot stand out.

I'm gonna get back to work and cook up some dialogue to finally put this page up on the site.  Thank you again for your continued patient support of my work.  I'm excited to get the rest of the story down on paper now that we've finally tied off this long plot thread.  Until next time, take care!