ALL EYES ON ME (pages 5 and 6)

So page five was basically the first page that I drew, and excitedly so. Before starting, I had already figured in my head how I was going to draw the plastic baggy filled with eyeballs against a black background, such that the light hitting the bag would give off such glorious contrast. It was my primary goal with the page.

When I first sketched Callisto, I drew her with a little pouch on her right leg, and only after that realized that it’s where she keeps the eyeballs she steals in the night.

I was also excited to do this big close-up of the octopus. It was my first time drawing her, and I really wasn’t sure of myself, with regard to whether or not I would be able to capture the roundness of the octopus with light, which was my sole intention - just incredible drama, still keeping things a bit in the dark with that chiaroscuro lighting. The harder part ended up being, though, rendering the eyeballs on her skin so that the feel like they are actually part of it and not just floating; it took me a lot of work to manage it in the way I did, and I still don’t know that it’s perfect hahaha.

Generally, I really, truly love black and white inking; a good inker, familiar with all kinds of methods for creating shadows via hatching or stippling or what have you, can really bring images to life in a way a penciller might not even be able to imagine. I, unfortunately, am not a good inker, and so my understanding of how to achieve my goals is quite limited - I also fear putting in tons of work only to realize that something DOESN’T work (although, this comic being drawn digitally, at least I could fix it). Nowadays, I barely even do inks anymore. Everything is defined by color and roughness (I almost think I need to figure out how to better render rougher materials with my relatively soft touch currently, but that’s something future me will figure out).

Because of all this, I ended up relying a lot on stippling, because that’s kind of my go-to when it comes to still producing rich black spaces. Sometimes it looks like a mess! Whatever hahaha. I am a pretty self-conscious artist, all things considered.

The lettering of the octopus was also a huge challenge; I originally had this grand idea that I would effectively draw her lettering in this super gothic, almost calligraphy-type thing, and then it would all be colored, very splotchy-like. When I did tests on it, thought, I realized the contrast against pure black or pure white ended up making the letters look unfortunately like ass, and so I went with this basically like italicized thing in hopes it would still read with the flourishy verve I had intended.

The way the octopus speaks is also very… it’s… I dunno, I have a tendency of writing very verbose characters sometimes, such as the agent in BODY. DOUBLE., and the octopus, literally a god, is no exception. I think she also speaks telepathically to Callisto. I wanted her first dialogue to be recounting her first impressions of Callisto, their story together, almost as a way to give context but also delay the introduction until we hit page six on the page turn.

Page six is… it’s okay. Like it’s the type of page I look at where I think a lot of how I did it just isn’t good, even if the idea behind the page itself is cool. I don’t adore how I rendered the octopus, I don’t adore what Callisto’s ass looks like — I had a ton of ideas with heavy contrast here, and most of them ended up paling in comparison to the images in my head because I am just not as good as that. I wanted to do a thing where, because the octopus is a god, she can actually break the storytelling in panels and engage with other panels; I do that a few times, including here, where her tentacle comes around and caresses Callisto’s eye hole.

I am kind of obsessed with power dynamics; I like the fact that Callisto has all the power on the streets, but back home she is submissive to her god. Her dominatrix exterior only works on the exterior, and the dynamics shift with her complete understanding of her place. It was super, super important to show this divide!

I kind of took page six and did another illustration inspired by it (below) after I had finished the comic, and I ended up liking it a lot more and wishing the comic had looked like that instead; but I think that’s kind of always going to be the case hahahaha. As we grow as artists, our understanding of what we do and how we do it just goes and goes and goes and every new day feels like you have progressed one-hundred-fold from the day before (if you are lucky). I draw so, so much art, and I don’t stick to any style for a super, super long time, and so, yeah, because this comic is over a year old now, it feels like an enternity ago. But that’s what I did at the time, and so… SO BE IT! Hahaha

Did you learn anything interesting about these pages? If you haven’t read it before, are you excited to keep up with it? Let me know down below! 😊😊😊