Comic Report #36.1 - A Light In The Darkness

Hello again!  I've had a productive week and I'm happy to get this page about 90% of the way finished in this work cycle.  I think the relative speed of painting this strip has a lot to do with the main subjects and panel counts being fairly low- pages where I have about nine panels cycling three or more characters in a scene are much more labor-intensive, so this one lets me somewhat approach the speed at which I used to be able to make pages.  You can't rush art, though, and I take a lot of pride in my craft, so I continue to try to learn to live with this timeframe.

Painting figures is one of the things I always miss when I shift focus to gamedev work. Being able to work in light & shadow is my greatest pleasure, so being able to define a limited light source and modeling depth & form are always my favorite pages to do; this is hard to do in outdoor shots where the background is all light sky, but indoors you can create such wonderful compositions by restricting where your light source is coming from.  In this shot, there's lights in the ceiling but there's also a big window at the front of the building, and since that's the direction I wanted Pat to enter the scene from I focused more on that light source than the ceiling lights, so the sense of direction in the strip leading up to his arrival is pointing towards him.  In the last panel I have a subtle effect where the light billows in from the window, shining on him and him alone; I wanted to create an effect like, ta-da!  Here's this idiot, and that's the way I thought about setting up the shot.  I might have to go back in and adjust the contrast a bit, as I feel like my midtones are a bit too dark, but I have it more or less where I need the shot to be, so I'm happy.

Within the spectrum of light and shadow painting, one of my favorite details to play with is reflection.  I have a process in my head for how I approach reflections on hard, smooth surfaces, and I think this page is a good example of how that process works.  When I have a figure making contact with the surface, I think of a reflection as a sort of inverted shadow.  A shadow I always try to conform to the shape of the surface its cast on, like laying a sheet of dark plastic on the ground, but a reflection ignores topography, I always try to pull it straight down.  While shadows try to keep the shape of the subject casting them, reflections blend that shape into a sort of abstract, vertical stretched taffy. Also unlike a shadow, which is sharp in contrast to the light around it, a reflection is a subtle variation in value, working more in soft, near-values than in harsh, sharp lights and darks. I'll usually start with a basic, stretched vertical shape and then look for areas where lighter or darker articles of a subject are making contact with the surface and pull very, very light shapes down in that space- you can see this illustrated in the third panel, where Lizzie's sleeve and the bandages on her hand are resting across the countertop. I start with the dark silhouette of her body, but then I pull these light little splotches down where her arm is resting to give the interior of that silhouette some very light-touch contrast, to imply the shape of her arm and hand.  A reflection is a good way to give figures a sense of weight, grounding them in a scene's space, as the reader's eye seeing the point of contact between a figure and the ground as implied by a reflection helps establish that that character is planted firmly where they are, rather than being a shape floating in space.  It's a very small detail, but it's the one I always enjoy painting in.

While working this week I decided that I would leave the background characters for the end of my process.  I wanted to have something nice to share and I thought if I could get a mostly-painted scene done for my weekly update, then fitting the main subjects into the shot would be more interesting than having half the panels unfinished but including the random townspeople in the background.  They shouldn't take me much longer, since I have them all blocked in and I have my light sources established, I can just blotch them in with soft contrast to keep them from conflicting with my foreground characters and then that'll be that!

You can expect another update from me this weekend, it shouldn't take me long to finish up this page and get it to that pre-text phase, and then the page will absolutely be posted on the site before Monday.  Thank you for sticking with us, I had a lot of fun painting this one.