Comic Report #86.1 - Double Time

So this has been my first week in a fairly long time where I didn't have anything else to do except work on the main comic, so that's exactly what I did.  Incidentally, after August's month of slow progress on a single page, I'm pleased to report that a week after posting the sketch phase of this comic I'm already nearly done with it.  I got all the main figures painted and I'm on my background pass, with the top two panels already drawn.  I expect to have this page finished this weekend, so keep an eye out for that textless final page soon.  

When I draw these comics I let myself just freely modify character designs in whatever way I fancy, I figure it's the best way to sort of evolve a character's design.  One of the main things I like to explore is the way I draw hair- for the past few pages I've drawn a more simple style of hair that was influenced by how I abstracted the characters' hair in their game design variants. I felt like I was getting too simplified, though, so on this page I'm exploring breaking the simple hair shapes apart a bit more.  You can see this in Lizzie's little hair sweeps having more jagged little subsweeps to them, kinda like how I used to draw hair with tons of little jaggies.  For Alice's hair I'm trying out drawing her front hair bang frame parts a bit more separated from the rest of her hair to make it a bit more visually interesting.

I have a lot more time to get these next pages done quickly, but being an outdoor scene I'm going to have to draw a lot of little buildings in the background, which should end up eating a bit of my work time.  This part of Tombstone is one of my favorites, it's set on the river with a bunch of benches, lamp posts and a lot of open scenic space, so it sets a nice mood.  Unfortunately I have to draw that mood every single panel; on the bright side, though, the coming scenes will have the camera positioned in front of the bench, so it'll be facing a few specific back walls behind the conversation.  I will be panning the camera, I think, so there should be some depth shots up and down the river, but I'll see how that goes when I get there.

As mentioned above I'm going to try to get this page finished this weekend, it's mostly just backgrounds from here on out.  I'm gonna be pulling my art references from a few other comic pages so it may take me a hot little minute but I will get there sooner than later.  Until then, take care.