Comic Report #85.3 - One More For The Road

Slow but steady progress continues on this page as I round out my do-or-die hell month of gamedev tasks on another job.  Thank you again for your patience during this time, once I am through these momentary hurdles I'll be able to put out main-comic pages much, much more frequently.  I should have this page finished and posted before this time next Friday, it's nice to have the finish line in sight.  I am running a bit low on juice I can post about regarding this page, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

One of my objectives for painting this page was to use the lighting to sorta shift the mood of the scene as its events unfold.  Starting in the first panel Monday's smiling face is lit from the front, to cast it as safe and pleasant.  As the panels progress the lighting turns, striking more from the side and ultimately lighting him from the back in the extended handshake shot with the Mayor, so that his face is cast in shadow.  I wanted to try to capture the feeling of the sky changing as a storm pulls in, as Monday draws nearer to the Mayor.  

The big main-shot middle panels have been blocked in and they look about how I expect them to.  The difficult part for this page was how to blend the eye staring into the background around it; what I ended up doing was try to use the highlight and shadow points of the actual eye, nose and brow shapes to blend out into the zoom lines in the peripheral.  Those spaces below the fire designs are where the word bubbles are going to go.  Another emerging problem was how to blend the eye shot downward into everything else below it, like the skulls and the figures around the Mayor.  What I ended up doing here was cutting a jagged mountain shape between the background and the foreground, this way I don't have to worry about rendering the eye-shot face below the eye sockets and I can have a light background and light skull shapes separated by the dark mountain field.  The jagged shape of the mountain helps sell the feeling of the moment, I think, so it's a happy add-on effect to that.  The Mayor himself is lit from below to emphasize his sense of dread at realizing who his new employee is, and I think for his lumpy old-man face it ended up working pretty well, I always love an opportunity to paint a lit-from-below shot.

This week is the end of my do-or-die deadline but I do think I can also get the rest of this page finished alongside that other work.  After this page goes up we are going to be fully in the clear to start a scene in the comic that people have been waiting for for a very long time, so it's just a little bit longer before we can get there.  Thank you again for your patience during this month, I promise to make it all worth the wait.  Until next week, have a nice weekend.