idletry: july 2024 update

hi again everyone. i've sketched 10 pages of idletry -- it's looking like the first scene will be 11 or 12 pages. i'm not super happy about it... i'm currently sketching at 25% of the size that the print files need to be, which means i will almost certainly need to reline the entire comic for print. i tried drawing at larger sizes, and it felt incredibly unpleasant.
i'm still not fully committed to the size that i've chosen, though, as it IS on the small side... i was hoping to draw at something closer to the size i use for sketch comics, just with the panels not all one big single-file column. if i can draw at that size instead, it will be 50% of the size needed for print.
after print testing brushes and liners, modifying the lines a ton of ways, etc. i really found that the one i preferred most was just the plain, crunchy sized up pixel lines. the others looked just sort of weird and hazy or... off. sizing the lines up by 400% is obviously too much, but doubling their size feels a lot more tolerable.
for the second scene, i will most likely try to force the sketch comic size and see if i can adjust mentally. i have not lined or colored any of it yet, because i haven't even figured out all of the stuff that needs to be consistent. i'm also kinda not happy with the first scene's choreography, per se, and might want to redraw it in significant ways.
aside from that, some space around the edges of the pages also has to be set aside to make sure that the art isn't trimmed off, which annoys me, but i've made a margins overlay to check while outlining panels, which works well enough.
i need to find a faster way to do borders, too... i believe for fresh meat i just used whole solid color lines, then altered them with the fill/outline tools to quickly turn them white with black outlines. i'll need to test some different panel border line thicknesses, too...
i also decided that the text would be thin, 1-px text, which will need to be relettered no matter what in the print version. space is so high-value, that the amount of vision lost between the 2 px and 1 px letters was less valuable to be than the amount of extra space smaller bubbles would provide. bear in mind that the letters are not the Only thing taking up space with dialogue -- there's also a huge white void around any given bunch of letters, and that scales a little weirdly.
not doing the bubbles is actually what makes doing sketch comics so feasible for me. i think if i had to do bubbles for them instead of just vomiting the text onto the panels, i would not have made nearly as many.

i know for sure that the panels in the scene that i thumbnailed are mostly too large. the green lines there on the thumbnail are from measuring panels compared to the ones i sketched at a more natural size. i print tested some of those sketches and know that they are the size that i want them to be when printed.
once i've figured out the actual drawing size that i will stick with for the rest of the comic, i will probably try to thumbnail another scene, or possibly just the same scene again. it's currently 24 pages, but when not consuming space so liberally, it might be able to be cut down to something more reasonable.

i'd also like to say that the book will almost certainly be cut into two. i was talking with some friends who have read the script, so they kind of understand what i mean by "the book being just one book is actually important to the plot," and one friend had an idea that i ended up going with. the plot, then, has been slightly altered to accommodate the fact that it's in two books, for better or worse. it dovetails nicely with a theme that only really comes to a head in act 3.
the second biggest worry is cost, then, which would be very similar regardless of how many books i split it into. the biggest financial concern with splitting the books is "book 1 gets funded, but book 2 doesn't" or "none of it gets funded, because two huge comic books are too expensive to pitch" but frankly that bridge is 2,000 miles away right now and i'm just not going to think about how i plan to cross it.
so the big stuff is out of the way... slowly things are getting ironed out. and i wanted to make it clear that i'm working on it whenever my hand and brain agree with me enough to make art happen. i'm also slowly editing the script and writing its second draft. i've kind of struggled with when to call it The Second Draft, because it has been edited here or there, cumulatively, for quite a while now. some scenes are very similar to their first drafts, some changed quite significantly. i can probably write up something about changes between the script and the drawn comic once i've done more. there have been slight tweaks here or there in the first scene due to either stupidity, pacing, space issues, or formatting.

tangentially, there is a blank page to the left of page 1 of the comic. when i'm posting it, i may or may not post the pages in couplets, but if i don't, know that odd numbers are on the right side of the page, right before a page flip, and even numbers are on the left side, right after a page flip.
it's a dick move, but if i have to publish the comic as i make it, i'm only going to be posting finished Idletry pages to the $15 tier. most of you are in that tier anyway, and clearly i'm not really posting side comics! i'm literally still lining the god damn hospital building in DYSTAI on the next page.