Comic Report #35.1 - Back In The Rhythm

Here's my Friday work report!  Shifting my mental gears back and forth between game animation and comic painting is fairly taxing but once I'm in the right frame of mind things move along pretty fluidly.  I wanted to have more of this page done by now but I have to remind myself I actually finished penciling it I think late last Saturday, so there was a little bit less time between the last post and this one.  Either way, I'll continue to do my best and move forward.

I spent a lot of time this week inking this page. Normally when I draw a page full of background characters I'll use a quick method to kind of block them in and give them the "good enough" look.  If they're background elements then they're not the primary focus of the reader's eye, so giving them lower levels of detail means they don't distract from the primary subjects of a panel.  In this page, however, the random townspeople -are- the focus, so I have to make sure they come out nice and sharp. I'm coming back into comicmaking fresh so I might be putting more effort into it than when I'm feeling burned out at the end of a big run, but I'm really happy with how the inks came out on this page.

For a while I would run a gimmick where I try to emulate a famous artist's style on my Twitter avatars, and I picked up a couple tricks studying those styles.  One of those shorthand tricks I really liked came from copying the Gorillaz - Demon Days album cover style. Particularly, I liked the use of a sharp jagged little shape to indicate highlights of the hair.  I emulated it below, and adapted it to my own work above:

Part of style emulation is really digging in and picking out what kind of decisions another artist made- what kind of shapes they use for ears or eyes, what kind of quality they give their lines, what color palettes they favor, how they interpret light and shadow. It's a great exercise, you end up reading a lot of subtext in another creator's visual writing and you pick up clues on their thought processes, and for myself I think running this exercise has influenced my own style, adapting a lot of that insight into how I see my own work. I think I'm a stronger artist for it.

When I get into painting I have to remind myself to let the tones be nice and chunky. I like to have defined facets of light and shadow, but I'll also fall into traps of trying to blend the in-between where I lose that distinction in my pursuit of roundness, and then I have to paint over it again to try to find some compromise level of detail that may or may not exist. I'm taking this page nice and chunky and so far I like the results. It's also pretty crowded, so I'm pushing through painting figures as quick as I can. 

 I'm looking to have this page done within this work cycle- it's a lot of individual figures, but it's also only five panels and the camera is pointing towards the wall, so there's not as much depth of field for me to have to account for.  I'll get back to work now, see you next week!