Behind The Scenes: Drawing A CHECK 💥

Hey folks! I was gone for a trip and down with a cold this week, but did my best to get pages inked and reaaadddy to go. 

Where Am I Currently? I'm a broken record BUT: Until May, I'm churning out pages. Pages!!! Inking!! Penciling!!! Drawing endless Bittys!! Right now, I'm inking Comic 4.20. That is, the 20TH COMIC OF YEAR FOUR.  It's going to be a continued marathon until I'm done inking all of these comics. 

- The header image above is from a comic about Samwell heading to the playoffs. I wanted to show the stress of a playoff series over time while showcasing several different moments, so I created the page layout from a playoff bracket! I'm excited for how this'll look in color....in 3 months. 🙃

- Progress on this shot of Bitty skating forward as captain. Notice how I haven't written in "Samwell" yet on their jerseys? For images with a lot of SMH jerseys at close-ish range, I usually put "Samwell" in digitally. (Except for on the cover of #Hockey--I draw those "Samwell's" by hand!)  Excited to be done with linework here--and I can picture dropping that final lighting layer over the page to really set this off!

Drawing A Check

1. In one of the final games of his career, Bitty is really getting beaten up by the opposing team. I shared this page with my friends and fellow comic artists Mad and Locke because it didn't feel dynamic enough. The page wasn't very impactful.

Fortunately my friends could come in with a ton of feedback! Locke pulled up some gnarly references and helped deconstruct what made the hits work (ice effects was a good observation!), while Mad redrew Bitty to show him absorbing the check. Also, we all came to the conclusion that I needed to zoom out to show the motion of the check.

And the redraw is below! 

- ice effects
- Bitty is crumpled
- zooming out
- imitating action from reference

I shouldn't be this excited about drawing Bitty getting SLAMMED into some plexiglass, but here we are. I'm so much happier with this page after getting solid critique! 

Quick Q & A

- I have no idea how many terms of language are required at Samwell, but if you're writing fic I would reference the requirements for any liberal arts school or yale!

- Old OT BLOG CONTENT: That's a project I have to work on--exporting the old blog content and perhaps creating a PDF? Archiving! And then sending that PDF to current patrons

- DID YOU KNOW? You can't fight in college hockey. Bitty brawling on ECAC ice is a thing I used to see in fic a lot, back in the day when I actually read fic! But just in case you're NOT into Check Please for the hockey--ya can't drop the gloves in the NCAA!

And that's it for me! This week, I'm afraid I still don't have very exciting news: I'm simply drawing comics. Nose to the grindstone. I look forward to seeing you all on Discord and social media, though!

Thanks again!

Ngozi