Comic Report #36 - An Old Friend

Hello again! This week has been pretty productive for me, I got further ahead on a comic page than I usually do and I'm ready to have it finished by this time next week, so that will be this coming week's objective.  As for this previous week, I'll give you the rundown on my work process real quick.

Part of why I got so into this page is it's all body language animating, and that's one of my favorite things to draw.  Rather than cut from shot to shot the whole page is mostly centered around a single shift of mood and expression, so it's all just gravy.  This page is also a pretty clear example of one of my favorite comic details to play with: camera movement.  A big part of the reason I draw the background in all of my comic panels is so the camera movement has context to help establish where it is and where it's pointing, which is a huge help during low-action or dialogue-heavy scenes that might otherwise be talking heads.  The camera is the reader's "presence" in the comic world, so giving it natural movement helps still movements feel more active and lively.

A practice I'd fallen into whenever I needed to draw a large number of anonymous background characters was to paint them in as silhouettes and give them a fast and loose paintjob when I'm doing a panel background.  I thought it was a time-saver, for not having to spend a lot of time inking or detailing specific characters, but I think it might have ended up taking me even more time to do, since I need to manually do all the detail-sharpening a lineart phase helps set up without the aide of lineart.  This is the exact same revelation I had when I tried to do all of my comic art line-free and then switched back to lineart from, so I'm not really surprised that I've drawn the exact same conclusion.  For this page I've decided to just give the background characters a quick linepver and then go in and paint them like I usually do.  In my older pages I had a problem where I would paint background elements with the same level of detail as foreground elements and details would get lost in the noise.  As an older, wiser artist I understand the value in subduing background detail as a way to maintain focus on the main subjects of a panel, so I figure I'll just give the background characters a thinner, simpler linework.  Increasing the contrast between fore- and background elements is another good way to maintain depth and focus, for example by painting your backgrounds with lighter values and lighter darks than your foreground subjects; this is more or less what I'll be doing when I paint this page.

It's been a while since I started building the current story arc of the main characters arriving in an actual civilization, and it's been exactly as long since we last saw the primary catalyst for segueing into this part of the story. Pat gets himself trapped in a building out in the world on an errand for the mayor, the crew rescue him and bring him back home, but the locals interpret his arrival as him having rescued Liz and Alice and it turns out the local authority has helped establish that narrative for him.  Pat knows this isn't the case, and he knows Liz knows it too, and now that Liz needs to pick up a lead on who killed the sheriff, Pat shows up. I'm excited to pull that hook, which has the tack-on effect of now I'm really eager to draw this page, the next one and the one after it.

When I finish this page I'm going to post details on taking some art commissions. It's a rough part of the year for me so I need to look for other work, and if you've ever wanted custom art from me that will be a great opportunity for us to help one another.  I post these kinds of announcements on my tumblr, at http://deadwintercomic.tumblr.com, so keep an eye there after I put up my final finished comic page.  Thank you again for all your patience and support, I say that every week but it sincerely means the world to me. I couldn't do all this without you.