BODY. DOUBLE. (pages 4-6)

Okay, OBVIOUSLY for me the selling point of my book was gonna be that title page. Just like… it had to be the hottest thing! So I put on my hottest clothes and took a reference photo and then drew it and it was so great!!! UNTIL!!! Until I tried to draw Leather Anaïs’ face! For some reason, getting that right took me FOUR HOURS - reason being because I tend to draw the shape of her hair first and create a space where I will fill in her face, but unfortunately that means that her face ends up looking awkward and small. So it was… a pain in my ass.

Something I didn’t mention in the last post about BODY. DOUBLE. is the texturing. I was originally going to do just very pure black and white - and while the book still IS that basically (everything gray is actually tiny, tiny black dots), I stumbled upon this way to create a screen tone that just became more intense the harder I pressed the brush. So it added some nice depth! But I don’t think I will ever use it again - something about it feels maybe like a cheat or something, I don’t know. Or amateurish. Or whatever! But I think on this page, the rendering on all that vinyl looks mouth-watering ahahahah.

It was so tough to figure out page five, though! I went through multiple incarnations of what that page was supposed to be; all I knew was that it had to end with a way that would set up the reveal of Anaïs’ Agent (who in this case is based off Albert Wesker from Resident Evil lmao). I had a page I had drawn already that was originally going to be like page 8 or something before the book actually took form in which I drew the glasses like that, so I just stole from that since I wasn’t using it anymore ahahaha.

I really like the utilization of the narrator in this comic, which, yeah, is supposed to effectively be read as Orson Welles. It doesn’t quite make sense - just a disembodied voice discussing the proceedings? But I think that’s super cool BECAUSE there is no other context to it. It’s this weird… I dunno, like weird kind-of decision that I think added a lot to the whole story.

The Agent in this story has my teeth. That was a specific criticism I had of myself - since the book is about Regular Anaïs being replaced by Leather Anaïs, and that’s actually what I had basically done in my other drawings of her (sorry, can’t stop drawing leather! In fact, Anaïs was originally supposed to actually NOT like leather. Like that was the goal. And then I realized my own stupidity… hahaha). So yeah, his slightly crooked, gapped teeth are meant to show my own connection with the villain of this story ahahaha. I kinda came up with the idea of the contract based on a little Anaïs sketch page I had done BEFORE I ever even started this comic, and it came to be so, so very important for the narrative! Haha.

Hope you all enjoyed this little run-through of these pages! Will go through the next few pages soon! 😊😊😊