Comic Report #46.1 - Moving Forward

Okay, so for a little while now I kept saying, oh, I'll make this next week all about the comic and then I kept getting sidetracked with game work, but THIS week I absolutely did nothing but focus on the comic, and I'm going to keep focusing on it until it's done.  It's a bit hard to switch back and forth, especially when the game is reaching a point where it's almost ready to be real and it needs my attention, but I never want to let the comic languish, it's an important half of the project as well.  Today, though, is all about the comic page- I'm expecting to finish this up over the weekend and I'm looking at a Monday or Tuesday release, by the way.

I'm real happy with how a lot of this page is coming out so far.  I've been relying on details from previous pages to give each panel a specific location, so the route back from the bus window to the boot rope can be implied from context.  I know where the big spotlights are from previous pages so when I lay out my red lighting orbs I can put the lighting in the correct spot for where the camera is at that moment.  I also tried to indicate forward movement between panels three and four by moving the sidewalk in the shot further down the panel, like Lizzie is walking forward while opening the book.  They're minor details but I feel like they sell the effect I needed in a single page.

In a previous post I'd put a filler name in for the title of the book Lizzie finds in the bus, but I thought to myself that I could do a much better job coming up with an original name instead of a dumb reference and I'm honestly really proud of this silly prop I've created.  I'll include a close-up shot of the book here so you can get a better look at it:

It's a romance novel set in old Budapest about a vampire maiden who falls in love with a muscular Hungarian carpenter.  I actually looked up where herringbone was used other than in clothing and found examples of flooring patterns from Hungary and that's entirely how I came up with that cover.  I think this works a lot better than "The Maiden of Argonia" by [covered by hand] Curio since it has at least three times as many word jokes in it.

Moving forward, this weekend I'm going to try to knock out the bottom half of the page, which happens to be the half of the comic with all the challenging shots in it.  The two penultimate panels shouldn't be as tricky as the last one, since my plan is to paint the base shapes in one panel and copy them over, and then add a layer of detail on top to keep them visually distinct.  You can always tell when something is wholesale copied and pasted and I try to avoid that because when you notice it it makes the art appear frozen and lifeless. The tells are always in the specific shapes of brushstrokes and the angles of certain lines, which is why when I want to repeat a background I try to get it to almost-done and then give each version its own unique surface-level details.

The last panel of this page is going to be an absolute trial for me to finish and it's why I've put my projected completion time at "Monday or Tuesday" and not Sunday.  Depth of field shots are always the hardest to paint and this one has both the vertical depth of needing to get the building Alice and Stacy are on top of correct but also the bus wall vanishing into the distance need to be scaled correctly with consideration for the river running perpendicular to it at a certain distance and my needing to go back through my old pages to figure out if I'd already established any specific buildings existing down that way, between the scene and the river.  Once I put the spotlight in the right place behind the Yellow Ponchos then painting the characters should be easier, but there's still six people and a boot who need to be given a "main focus" level of detail in this shot so that's going to be taxing. 

Once I have this page finished I'll make another post with the wordless art, and that should definitely be some time this week.  Thank you for being patient with my work as I juggle all the things I gotta get done.  This is going to be a fun week for posting!